Blending Mixamo motion capture animation - CINEMA 4D Tutorial

- [Instructor] Character rigging and animating is hard, maybe one of the hardest things to do in 3D, but with Mixamo, it is an absolute breeze. Now Mixamo's a website that allows you to easily rig and apply mocap animation to any character. In this video, I'm going to show you how you can create your own custom character animation by blending multiple mocap files together, using Cinema 4D. So here we are at mixamo.com and Mixamo comes with your Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. So what you can do, is once you log onto Mixamo, you can either go into the character's menu and kind of choose whatever character you want, or you can just go directly into the animations and just use this little robot guy. Again, you can choose whatever kind of character you want and apply animation to it, or you can even upload your own character from Cinema 4D and apply mocap animation to it, but I'm just going to stick with our little robot dude here and I'm just going to go into animations and here we have a whole boat load of mocap animations, mocap data that you can apply to this character. So, I'm going to go ahead and let's just stick with this looking around kind of pose, and you can even search for this, so looking around, and there we go. We've got this looking around, we've got a couple of 'em, where you're just like kind of pointing and stuff like that. It's kind of cool, I like that, although it looks like he's holding guns or somethin', let's go back to the normal looking around and what we can do at this point, is we can edit some of these body types and maybe he has his arms out a little further and we can have a surprise level, crank that up so each individual pose has its own little sliders. Overdrive can either speed things up or slow things down, as you can see now, it's really slow. And then you can adjust like the character arm space. So if your character's arms are kind of like intersecting, you can always adjust this to make sure there's no geometry overlap as you can see there. And you can also bring up the total amount of frames, so if we have like negative 50 to 150, we have a whole bunch of frames, but let's just say we're going to have a pretty short kind of looking around pose, so let's just bring this down to, you know, maybe just, you know, 102 frames or somethin' like that. Or 95, there we go, that looks good. So just a few frames and then we're going to want him to kind of blend into a dance, okay? So let's go ahead and first download this pose. All of these defaults are fine. And I'm just going to download this to my computer. Okay, so that's saved as an FBX file and now, let's have this little robot guy go from looking around to dance, I mean come on, we got to do some dances here and this is one of the most fun parts about Mixamo. You can see that you have 155 results for dancing and man, you could just have a lot of fun just watching this stuff, so goofy. So you can choose whatever dance you want. Let's do the poppin' 'em, I don't know if that's poppin' and lockin', I don't know what that is. It's the tut hip hop dance, sure. Let's do that and that looks pretty cool and again, you have all of these different sliders here. Again, different sliders than the pose we had before and then we can also adjust the total amount of frames for this dance, okay, so we can also trim this in Cinema 4D, so it really doesn't matter. You probably want the full flexibility of as many frames as you can get and then choose whatever you want, so I'll just adjust those and then again, we will download this to our computer. Now, this is going to download both the robot model and the animation, okay? So there's my two FBX's. We can download even more if you wanted to, but I'm just going to use the two just to demonstrate how we can blend between these two. So let's go ahead and jump over to Cinema 4D. Right, so here we are in Cinema and we're just going to go ahead and load up those two files. So I'm just going to go to file, merge project, and here's my looking around, I'll open that and all of these settings are fine, default settings are fine, I'm just going to click OK. And, let's just say no to that and here we have our joints that make up the animation and kind of drive the character and here are the two objects that actually make up our character here okay? So that's all that this is made up of, okay, and the animation, boom, we have it all in here. Let's actually spread out the timeline here to account for the full 122 frames that this movement takes. So we have one of our little Mixamo animations in here, so let's open up the other FBX, which is the tut hip hop dance, and we'll open that up and here we have same thing, we have the joints that make up this character, that have all the key frames applied to it and then the geometry, okay? So, what we're going to do with these characters is all the animation lives on these joints so what we're going to do is basically bake these out and save them as what's called motion clips, that will then allow us to almost blend motion clips in these animations together like footage in Premier, or Final Cut, okay? So let's go ahead and basically bake these out as motion clips. So, I'm going to select the joint here, the Mixamo rig hips, and I'm going to go to animate and go to add motion clips. Now this is where you can basically bake out this animation as a motion clip, so this is almost treated as a piece of footage that you can then adjust in a timeline, you can, you know, cut and clip, and kind of blend together different clips. So let's rename this to the tut dance, okay, and I'm just going to click OK. And what this is going to do is apply a motion system tag. Now if we go to our motion system tag and go open in timeline or open in TL, you can see that this whole entire animation is now almost represented as, again, like a piece of footage that you might see in Premiere or Final Cut and we can move this around, we can even access some of the motion system settings here. You can make transition, you can, you know, cut or trim your little piece of footage here and then there is my little tut dance over here in our little browser. Now if I right click on this tut dance, we can actually save this out as a motion source, okay, so that's exactly what I'm going to do because we need to save this motion source out and import it into our other file that we have, that we opened previously. So let's go ahead and let's save this motion source as and you'll see this will prompt you to save this as a c4dsrc file, so let's just rename this tut dance and we'll save that out. Okay, so that'll save out that motion source and if we just jump back into our other project here, this is the file where he's just standing around. Now how can we get this animation to blend into that tut dance? Okay, well we need to do the same thing with this Mixamo rig hips in this character. So we're going to go ahead and add this to a motion clip or bake this as a motion clip, so we're going to go to animate, add motion clip, and again, this is just the standing around. We want to name these so we know what is what and everything is fine, default, and we're just going to click OK. And again, we're going to have that motion system tag. If we go to open in timeline, you'll see that this is now its own motion clip as well and you'll see that here is our standing around motion source. Now we could go and save this as a motion source as well if we wanted to, you know, add even more, import this into other files, so let's just do that just for the sake of doing it and there's the standing around, and now what we can do, is if you right click, you can actually load a motion source as well. So, remember we saved out that other motion source of the tut dance, so let's load that up. So, we can load up that tut dance c4dsrc file and open that up. So what we can do is actually just click and drag and add this to our little timeline here. So here is our standing around clip, here is our tut dance clip, and if we go and maybe move this down and move these up, one thing you can do is you can actually have these two clips blend together as you have them overlap. You can see there's this nice little S curve of ease in, ease out. So, let's actually see what this looks like without any of that, let's just have this clip just butt up against the other one and let's see what we got. So let me just make this a little smaller and let's go ahead and hit play and you'll see that this is playing through the timeline and it just snaps to that dancing. 'Cause we have the looking around, boom, and it snaps to the other animation, but if we use that little overlap in blend, check this out. Let's go and just move these down, let's actually give ourselves a little bit more room in our timeline, let's maybe give it 300 frames. And then we can zoom out here and so now we can see both of our clips and let's again go back to frame zero and hit play. You see we're goin' then it blends into that dance. So we have the standing around and then blends into the little dance party right there. So lookin' around, blends, and boom, we're blended together seamlessly into this other Mixamo mocap animation. So, this is kind of the power of Mixamo, where you can save out as many animations, mocap animations from Mixamo, downloading them, saving them as motion clips, motion sources, importing them into your main file, where you're kind of staging your whole scene and all of the acting moves and all that stuff and yeah, it's just so incredibly powerful. So, all that being said, you're welcome, you're now a character animator, kind of. So hopefully this gives you an idea of how powerful Mixamo and motion clips are, allowing you to compose and stage your own character animation by blending these clips together. And one really cool thing is artists have actually done entire short films and animated characters for short films using this method, so the possibilities really are endless. So I hope you have fun with Mixamo and make your own little animations, I'll see you next week. So you don't want to wait until next week to learn something new? No problem. Here are some other ways to feed your creative brain to keep you busy. You can check out my other courses in the LinkedIn library, visit my website eyedesyn.com for more tutorials, subscribe to my YouTube channel and be alerted when I post a brand new tutorial, join my Facebook page for daily mograph inspiration and keep up to date on all my latest mograph creations on Instagram. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you here again next week.