Life-like animations

Putting the specific tools aside, is there a common technique, shared amongst seasoned SL animators, for creating the life-like animations that grace the grid of SL?

I know, some of the professional animators in-game have some kind of "suit" they they wear in real life that records physical movements at the joints and records them in a manner that gets interpretted into a BVH file. Since I don't have a mint to purchase such a suit and/or software, do you have any tips or tricks for breaking down an animation from initial pose to finished product?

Animating seems to be a very tedious task and I'm just looking for any "secrets" anyone has discovered for making the job of creating realistic animations a bit easier to get a hold of.

Thank you, in advance, for your words of wisdom!

Bartiloux

You're talking about motion capture (ie. mocap.) No access to that sort of resource is the main reason I've avoided doing dance animations. Dancing is the one thing I'm not confident I can hand-animate.

Motion capture is the easiest way to get lifelike animations quickly, if you're willing to spend big bucks for access to the proper equipment. Animating by hand can get great results too if you practice enough and have the talent. All of the pixar and dreamworks movies were animated by hand without any motion capture. Movies like polar express and final fantasy relied more on motion capture.

I recently made two very natural animations for SL using mocap (bvh) files downloaded for free from the Internet. These animations can be particularly effective where your AV is just standing idle or walking. Some of the bvh files you can find on the Internet (in particular those from bvhfiles.com) are not in a format accepted by SL. They can be converted to a format compatible with SL using free software. See this thread for details: /52/41/152115/1.html

Thanks to all for the great advice. I wonder if I might post a follow-up to my original question. When making animations "by hand" as it seems to be called, do you typically spend most of your time grabbing body parts and dragging, or do you rely more on the dial for twist, wiggle and raise? The latter seems to afford tighter control over what all takes place, but I'd be curious to get the opinions of the professionals out there.

-Bartiloux

I've done a lil' of both, but I find the dials to give me a bit more accuracy at times. Sometimes when you grab a foot or hand with IK enabled, it likes to twist it in some bizarre fashion.

And if you can't cough up the couple thousand $$$ for a MoCap setup, there's always Rotoscoping! The poor man's MoCap

Just import video to the background and move the character to match the video.

Ya know... I was thinking about pulling up a separate window next to Poser so I could match the video to my animation frame for frame. There really is software to help with that??? Cool!

Poser can import video files as the background. If you check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uHsLVaILYY I did most of the movement in that by filming myself with my webcam. If you set the preview mode to outline then you can see through it pretty easily. The trick is to get the camera set just right first.

I'm a little dubious that any of the professional animators in SL use a motion capture suit, unless they happen to have access to one for animation work outside of SL. Like other people have said a mocap setup costs a great deal of money. It's a little difficult to find prices but if the Gypsy 5 is any indication (and Gypsy systems seem fairly popular from Googling) an 'affordable' systems seem to run somewhere in the neighborhood of $25,000. At around L400 to the dollar a person would need to make L10,000,000 just to break even (although if they get their hands on a used system that could be substantially reduced).

Like others have said, your best bet will either be rotoscoping or using filmed footage as a reference (different from rotoscoping in that you do not try to position the character directly over the filmed actor).

I've been a 3D animator for over 3 years working with leading professional houses and I've only worked on one project that a client insisted we bring in mocap. Although most of the work I do is commercial/industrial in nature, I have a lot of friends who are independent filmmakers, so I'm always asked to help out on shoots that are low (or no) budget.

We once shot a three day sci-fi short that was going from live action to 3D space via green screen and decided to fool around with some poor man's mocap. Now, this is really not something I'd recommend for work in SL, it's just for fun and we were experimenting. However, it did yield some cool results, albeit cheesy - due to the bad writing of course

We managed some green screen material that was sun damaged from a local rental house at a really cheap price and stretched it over a home made frame constructed with 2X4s and proceeded to light it very evenly so as to reduce uneven shades of green.

We then brought in an actor who was in a sort of a Ninja outfit - well, more like a SWAT guy in black tights. We stuck small reflective discs provided to us by our Art department - just small cardboard cut outs with reflective tape stuck on one side - all over this guy. I think there was a Marvel super hero who slung discs at people - kinda reminded me of him, but I digress...

We wanted to see if the discs could "capture" joint positions accurately if the actor moved slowly as to reduce motion blur - a big problem with some of the cheaper sensors in mocap systems. With the right amount of light, we got enough "bounce" off those discs to be picked up on miniDV.

To our amazement, the results were really cool on film (or tape). The green screen allowed us to composite the actor onto any background of our choosing - a convenience really, because we couldn't really do anything with our "Disc Ninja". The movements allowed us to study where joints and limbs interact - thus allowing one of our riggers to reproduce a skeleton based on the human form - but expanded to elongated alien sized bones. He used After Effects with two video layers stacked on top of each other and set to the right opacity so he could see both video sources - one 3D and one live action. While working in Maya - he would animate and export the video - refresh in AE and do the keyframe tweeks to line up the bones with the disc'd actor back in Maya.

Tedious, perhaps, but man the results helped us get a more fluid movement since the bones were based on live action. I'm sad to announce that the project has been shelved due to lack of time and funding, but if I can get a hold of the footage, I'll see if I can post it.

Thanks for letting me blab away

There are other ways to get convincing movement with out rotoscoping or mocap. I am new to SL, but am a long time student of character animation in general. I have come across many books, but the best I have found is The Animator's Survival Kit

One of the key concepts it teaches is overlapping actions. I think once you get your mind wrapped around that concept you will start creating animation that is a little more life like.

P.S. I will be starting at Animation Mentor(.com) next month, and this is a recommend book for that course.

You hit the nail on the head Lazarus, the gypsy suit is not a cheap investment and it takes alot of work getting the suit to fit the movement of rl motion,but once it is dialed in you can almost do just about anything in it but who wants to get to wild in a $22,000 dollar piece of equipment,not me.Real life motion is absoulutly possible, all the work i have done in sl (well 90%) of my work I have made from scratch nothing more than poser,the suit as realistic as it is it can be frustrating at times,the suit is good for a project or if you have alot of animating in mind its not something you just throw on and get going.My best advise to you is to learn the program you are using to animate with like the graph very important piece for me,along with the hot keys that are used to minipulate the graph and when and how to use inverse kinetics,where to add key frames in conjunction with the overall animation,get up out your chair and do the animation yourself play it thru in rl painting pictures in your head as how the motion of the human body is,I think i read in a reply from someone here about importing video's that is totally true you can and it might help you to get a better picture as to how our bodies move but no matter what, just like everything in life, if you are willing to take the time and really learn then it will be rewarding.I just recently finished my first Slow Dance 0v0,now that was a tough animation, one of the hardest ones i have ever done and it is just a simple looking sway from side to side.Well i don't know if this is very helpful or not but good luck,i would like to see some of your work,I buy up every good animation i find just to see how others are doing and of course because my gf loves animations lol or was that me?

tc and good luck