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Hey! I'm not sure how useful this'll be to other folks, but for my specific workflow it's pretty nice, and wanted to share just in case!

It's idling (standing/sitting around bored) motion capture data where the rest poses have been normalized (no T-poses), so you can immediately use automatic weights to slap your photoscan directly onto one of a few idling animations to bring it to life. I'm planning on using it quite a bit for crowd shots.  

I'm still loving the Rokoko suit (all this data's from it), and I just really wanted to be able to easily use it on photoscans that were captured in ways other than a friggin' T-pose.

DOWNLOAD:
BVHs  (in the import window, set scale to ".01" (assuming you don't want a giant))
Blend File (just append whatever you want, either the rig objects, or the whole collection)

ALSO- the BVHs are 1.8mb total, which makes sense for some rotation data. The blend file is almost 180??? Why 100 times larger? Can anyone explain why the data becomes so much larger once it's an action?

For folks who are curious about setting their own rest poses without making all the animation data wonky, the tutorial's there at the end, and here's a link to the addon:
https://github.com/helluvamesh/GYAZ-Animation-Tools

Also- it's very possible there's a different way to do this (it feels like there should be), but I wasn't able to find it (I even used Bing), and the Way of the Mocap is a very narrow path and once you get into the weeds the variables pile up and you finally find a thing that works but you can never recreate it and it's a nightmare and you try to explain your problems to the people closest to you but that's frankly pushing the limits of their ability to provide sympathy while also having nooooo idea what you're talking, so I'm mostly just happy I made it as far as I did :P

ALSO, I really am hoping to do a BIG ol character photoscan shoot with folks who aren't just me and Sean and Nathan and Kaitlin over and over, and rig them all up- I'll be sure to upload them here when I do! 

Files

Asset: Idle Animations for Bringing Photogrammetry to Life

Comments

Anonymous

Night owl! Looking forward to watching this!

IanHubert

It's only midnight! (he protested quietly, knowing full well he'd be going to bed at 5am)

Anonymous

already loving the shots from the first few minutes! if you ever get around to it maybe a little tut on the volumetrics (like really getting those god rays from the lights and stuff)? it honestly looks way easier then it is haha.. cheers!

IanHubert

Ah thanks! And that was actually exactly the one I was doing this morning before I abruptly pulled a U-turn and this one for some reason, haha- yeah! I want to do a kinda "big dramatic landscape with big clouds and lightrays" tutorial real quick here.

Anonymous

Dude thats is awesome. The shots you've made there are so inspiring. Thank you for this!

Tolga Katas

good stuff, Ian thanks!

Anonymous

I always think it's odd to use Kaitlin as a background character when she is the lead. Too easy to spot her in 15 different places at one time especially with her hair :)

IanHubert

I agree!! I'm hoping to swap her all out with a good variety of other scans for the final renders. I came up with a kinda effective way of swapping her face out (basically just replacing it with the few faces I've gathered with "FaceApp"), but yeah, her hair/body are still a pretty good giveaway, for sure.

Anonymous

please do anything with real people in real footage into cg world,, like in old green screen tuts.. these cg model people doesnt look good in amazing cg world you created. and how to manage ram and gpu memory optimization.. render layers.. rendering animations less time best output,, how do u manage them?? my pc is 6core 8gb rtx 4gb.. so help us!!

Anonymous

Hey Ian, just wondering would you ever do a video similar to this for the rokoko suit and your method of transferring the data to blender? I know that rokoko has this already and I know not many people can afford the suite but my work has just bought one for their unreal users but I wanted to use it with blender I just pefer your method of teaching :)

Anonymous

Hey Ian - why not open source the photoscan? Maybe see how many of us on here want to give it a go and scan ourselves and pick the useable ones. If you provide a dress code then I’m sure plenty of us would have a go at it?

IanHubert

Well that would be amazing!! I’ll try to think through some logistics! If we could end up with a big library of scanned humans that anyone could use…. Okay that’s a very exciting thought :D

IanHubert

That’s why I’m trying to make the cg people better!! But yes! I have a biiiig practical shoot coming up at some point, at which point the focus will jump back to compositing for a long time. And for sure- I’ll try to do a deeper dive soon into scene/rendering optimizations :)

IanHubert

Oh yeah, this was Rokoko data! I can let you know what export settings I use to get it out of Rokoko when I get up tomorrow (on the blender side getting the data in is as easy as importing the FBX and remembering to check “correct bone orientation” in the import window) You had a chance to mess with the suit yet??

Anonymous

I’m getting a rokoko suit soon( ordered back in July, but there are delays, which is understandable!) I’m looking forward to creating some Mocap for the community! I love the idea of us sending in photoscans of us in costume!

Anonymous

Ian are you photo scanning with your DSLR or phone? I've been considering updating to a newer iphone just so I can photo scan objects and maybe people but I'm wondering if you can actually get good results with the phone or just low detail scans for background placement. Thanks!

Anonymous

Ian, I am a loyal fan and I enjoy all of your tutorials. You’re awesome. Have you tried combining/blending two or more mocap animations in Blender? For example combining a run, jump, and a climb motion. I know that it may be possible to do the whole thing in a single animation with Rokoko, but it’s nice to know that blending is possible.

Anonymous

As always Ian thanks for uploading! Always brightens my day!

Anonymous

that shot with the projector at 1:29 is so sick! i love that

Anonymous

do you think you could possibly ever make a tutorial just talking about how you light your scenes, your render settings, and also after effects? i think after effects is something that i definitely struggle with because honestly the interface just looks so intimidating and thats what has kinda held me back from it. its kinda the opposite of blender because blender's interface is so smooth and nice and inviting that it just makes it so much easier for me to learn, if that makes sense.

Anonymous

Haha, I never heard anyone say that Blender's UI makes more sense than AE's! I suggest you should look into Blackmagic Fusion. If you're more used to node based interfaces it's a lot easier to grasp, and it's a way more powerful compositor than AE.

Anonymous

Thank you Ian! very useful technique, and beautiful, beautiful shots in the intro. Can't wait to watch the next episode :-)

Anonymous

Augh, that old "Apply rest pose" problem still exists? Crazy the hoops you've got to jump through to get that to work. I foolishly and optimistically began writing a script to do this in one button press. It doesn't work with rotation yet, but who needs armature bones to rotate? https://blenderartists.org/t/script-to-apply-pose-as-rest-pose-without-corrupting-animation-action-keyframes/1335456

Anonymous

Ian has recently been using the polycam app on his iPhone and it actually gives some amazing results. I know it advertises itself as using the new LiDAR capabilities only in the newer iPhones but it also has a standard Photo Mode that delivers the bulk majority of good photoscans. Your older iPhone *should* be able to work with it :)

IanHubert

YES! Half my problem with googling was a part of me thinking, "but surely this can't even be an actual problem, and there's just a button I'm missing..." although I'm honestly surprised I didn't stumble upon your thread during my search (though mostly I was searching, "how to apply automatic weights in pose mode!" instead of "how to alter rest pose without messing up the animation data") OH WAIT! I'd thought you'd made that script a while back- this is from an hour ago, haha! Man yeah!! I'm following the thread- hopefully someone has some transform matrix wizardry. If there could be a one-click solution for that, that'd be ludicrously cool! Thanks for poking at that!!

Anonymous

Marvellous... I'm supposed to be "at work"... but would much rather watch this/these videos... those rendered shot you showed look incredible. The "bird ship" is so different from your usual style... great contrast to the environment! Love it.

Anonymous

Ian might you still tackle a tutorial on photoscan best practices? I'd love to hear more about your cases for phone vs DSLR and strategy for how to handle larger environment capture.

Followfocus

The shot with the bird ship is MIND BLOWING. Awesome.

Colornap

Lovely to get to see a few shots early in the video. At 1:37 I thought it was thunder at first! So cool.

Anonymous

Hey Ian! Concerning the "big landscapes" video you mentioned, will you be including getting horizons to work? I'm making a scene within which there is a drone shot of a city being built and the hardest part is getting a believable horizon from an above perspective. I'm sure you've had to figure this out in the past

Anonymous

Ok so I’ve been going through the shots you posted from your scenes on this video multiple times now, and the ship scene really blowed me away. Ok so a quick back story, In the past month I’ve seen dune and foundation on apple tv, something that really caught my eye was their ships in frame, for some reason the ships have this size about them that I haven’t seen from other movies/ shows (e.g marvel/Star Wars) but now your ship and the scene that they are in has the same feel. It’s bugging me why that is. I feel like the only way I can figure it out is to make the same scene as yours and fail to make it work (I learn from failing) to figure out the reason, maybe it’s the focal length of the camera, the light or many other reasons but I want to know!!!!! Hahaha

IanHubert

Oh! The tutorial was mostly going to be from low-down (which I think i do out of habit for exactly the reason you're describing :P, but also because landscapes tend to feel more "epic" when you're looking up at them)- but dang, yeah that's a hard one. My thought right now: the easiest way to get it all to work is to find a really useful HDRI for the actual horizon/sky, that way you only have to make the ground extend a long ways and then "blend in" to the HDRI (if your scene has some haze in it it becomes a lot easier)- If you have a big (or a few) large ground planes, maybe you could implement almost the reverse of the video below, so that they start to fade out at a certain distance and naturalistically blend into the environment map? I've tried it before in the past with pretty good luck. https://www.patreon.com/posts/quickie-making-55192869 If you have a bunch of ground geometry, it might be worth making a node setup like the one above, but then turning it into a node group, so you can super-quickly slap it on to any object that happens to be near the horizon and control the distance falloff globally, like at 17:30 in this video: https://www.patreon.com/posts/tutorial-making-56088138 I'll try to think about it more though and see if I can think of anything else- A drone shot of a city being built sounds absolutely kickass :D

Anonymous

experimenting with fluid sims?! hell yeah. looking forward to your tutorial when you've figured it out so I can finally be bothered to learn about it

Anonymous

same man not many have experimented with optimizing fluid sims in blender and hopefully IAN does something cool with it where we can actually have sims without 1 terabyte caches (ouch)

Anonymous

I believe it's the little hard surface details If you look at his truck modeling video he goes over how not adding the little detail makes the ship look like a toy and that might end up being your issue

Jack_Wolfe

Wow You're so generous with giving out content, you know what you should do, you should get some community JAM's going using the assets you upload :D

Anonymous

you probably already know that but you can slide the curves of the bones in the graph editor to adjust the rig to the model (the curves that are responsible for the rotation), it won't affect the keyframe so the animation still works and the rest pose is closer to the original mesh.

Anonymous

may i know how to do that time machine disappear effect on blender?

Anonymous

Hey John, my first time commenting on Patreon so not sure how it works or if you'll see this or whatnot. But the best and only HDRI solution for very large scale scenes is an addon called "Sceneskies HDRI Pack". It is just incredible. Go look into it on the Blender Market. Hope that helps a bunch

Anonymous

guess I'm doing something really wrong, I tried to attach the armature to a mesh, ctrl+p. automatic weights and , after a bit of "blender is not responding" it just creates the thing with the armature animating super slow (4fps on a ryzen9 +3090) and the mesh standing still