Home

Introduction

Mocap Clipper was built to reduce most of the manual work required in processing mocap for game animations. Best suited for things like Locomotion or Emotes.

It was made to work hand-in-hand with the Time Editor in Maya. I try not to recreate wheels that already exist. Since Time Editor already has a whole suite of workflows for moving, cutting, blending, and grouping clips in a visual way, I figured all we needed at Embark were a couple of convenience things on top.

In 2016, Dan Lowe presented The Animate Button at GDC. Which was very influential in the design of this tool.

How it works

This is a tool meant for studio use. From the ground up, it has been designed for integration into already existing pipelines. The specifics of things like pose application and baking to rigs are left to the Technical Animator or Technical Artist on the project to decide. (I have no idea how you might want to transfer animation to your rigs, so it's up to you)

An example project is available in the releases section, which includes a bare minimum implementation.

Workflow

The general workflow is like this:

1. Import Mocap.
2. Cut the mocap into clips via TimeEditor.
3. Determine start/end pose.
4. With some convenience actions, align the skeleton at the world origin
5. If it's a walk/run cycle, The aim buttons can be used to align the end position in a specific direction.
6. Check "Run Adjustment Blend" if you like. All of the actions in Bake Configuration can be run manually via right click.
7. Press Bake to Rig to get the final result.

You are now many steps closer to having game-ready animations.