This is the first post I’ve made since I moved my portfolio and blog over to ktcg.art, so I thought it would be fun to make a post about that entire process. It’s a litte outside the tech art scope of my site. But, I can imagine other artist-developers being curious about how they can make a site like this themselves. This site is hosted on GitHub pages and built by Jekyll.

Hello! This is the second workflow breakdown for my thesis film. It will concern the motion capture animation process. Check out the first post about using Unity to make a short film that covers the Unity workflow itself, and watch the film itself on my animations page.

Hello! I recently completed production on 8-minute 3D animated short, which I made using Unity. In this post, I’ll be breaking down my workflow, from character modeling to final render. I’ll also be evaluating the merits and limitations of using Unity in this way. This is probably going to be a chonky post, so below is my list of content, so you can scroll to whichever section interests you, or read the whole thing if you want to get a picture of the overall workflow. There’s also a link to the completed film and the Unity packages I used at various points in the pipeline.

I wanted to share my process for setting up a character for mocap retargeting and facial animation in MotionBuilder. I prefer to make a clean character file to retarget onto, with all the possible assets that I would need for a given project. Having all assets on a character from the beginning of the retargeting process minimizes the risk of realizing I need another feature (character face, voice device, etc.) later on, when I’ve already created several motions, and might need to set up the same asset on multiple files. In fact, I think of character setup as the final step in the rigging process, rather than the first step in the animation process. It’s just better pipeline management.

Last year, I worked on a short called Midland Safari Putt-Putt, which I animated in Maya using flat planes. I picked this method because I was the most well versed in Maya (as opposed to another animation software like Harmony or After Effects), but I didn’t have time to go through the entire 3D pipeline. However, I really wanted to tell this story (which is true, by, the way). So, I had the option of scoping my project by a) using the workflows I was familiar with (i.e. modeling, texturing, rigging, animating, figuring out shots, rendering) to make something really short and small, or b) figure out a new way to make what I wanted. This project taught me that Maya (and any other software package) should be treated as a tool, and the way it is “supposed” to be used or is “usually” used shouldn’t necessarily determine what kind of project you can make.

This post isn’t going to a tutorial in the way that my previous posts have been. Rather, it’s going to be some advice on how to approach bringing custom animations and characters into Unity, based on my past couple of years experience working on projects that utilize the (Motionbuilder) - Maya - Unity pipeline, and I’ll try to update this post with new considerations that I discover!

An eye controller that allows you to manipulate the character’s look-at point is a bog-standard feature of any rig:

UPDATE: In section 1 of this post, we paint the blendshape weights for the character. I’ve noticed a bug where sometimes, all your morph targets don’t appear in the “Target” section of the Paint Blend Shape Weights Tool. You can get around thing by right-clicking on your base mesh, and while holding down the right mouse button, move down to Paint > Blend Shape > your desired shape.
UPDATE, THE SEQUEL: I recently discovered that Maya’s fbx exporter doesn’t export shape masks (also know as blend shape weighting). If you made multiple shapes on one model and masked some of them out, this isn’t going to work in MoBu – the entire mesh is going to be effected. If you make this mistake and don’t want to make new targets, you can turn up the original shape (with the mask on the target) up to 1.00, all of the others down, select the base mesh, and in the Shape Editor, do Create > Target from Selection. Then, you’ll have a target with only the desired deformation. See me discover this on the Autodesk forums.