Animation and Mocap Transfer Tool
Became the owner of the tool we use for transferring animations between humanoid characters in Maya. This involved a lot of support for new shows that had different requirements in addition to multiple improvements to make the tool more useful and efficient for the artists.
This tool gets a source animation, either from an FBX from motion capture or from an animated rig in the scene. Then we also have a database of skeleton and rig definitions we can match to the skeleton and rig to use for Maya's Human IK. The user can then specify a target asset and the tool will automatically load that asset, use Maya's Human IK to transfer the animation from the source to the target, and then bake that new animation in the target rig to be able to save it in a new Maya scene.
There is also the ability to attach a prop to specific prop joints of the characters, mainly in the hands, to be able to attach weapons and things like that. The props will then get the rotation and translation from any source prop mocap data baked into them.
This tool is greatly used along our motion capture process, in addition to also being used to be able to re-use animation from older shows in our newer ones.
I was also able to re-structure this team to make it more shareable, so it is being used currently by some of the game teams as well. I made it so that all the base structure and functionality is shareable, with a few options that can be modified in a config to be able to adapt the tool to the team's needs.
Used:
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Python
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Maya
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Qt
Results from an investigation I did into using Sam3D to convert photos or videos into mocap data we can transfer to our rigs:
