#Mocap2019

[kii-blog]

Making Character In Vroid

The video record of how I made the character’s hair and the ending was the first testing result.

[kii-blog]

Back to Vroid and Draw the Textures

Since the model and the pipeline are surely working, I go back to Vroid to model the character even further. Working on the texture of the face.

And also change the position and ratios of the face.

[kii-blog]

Export FBX from Blender to Maya

Since there is no plug-in and Maya is not supported VRM file, I exported fbx file from Blender to Maya. 

However, the skeletons were not at the correct places, I deleted the big rings around the character. It seemed the skeletons were still working, but maybe rigging the character manually would be better.

The texture was not read by Maya which causes issues on presenting the character looking.

The topology of the character was not looking good on the character too. It was all squares in Vroid, but it was read as triangles in Maya. (Perhaps, it was read as triangles in Blender too?)

[kii-blog]

Zbrush Learning Note 01

Tools > Click on Simplebrush to change to other primitive.

Edit mode, click it for starting sculpting. Press T is the short cut.

Turn on make PolyMesh 3D to start sculpting.

[kii-blog]

Restart Again from FBX file and Cleaning Blendshapes

I looked at the fbx file again and realised that the blendshapes are actually in the file. They didn’t show up just because they were not linked to the normal face.

[kii-blog]

Cleaning The Mesh of Body and Re-assigning Texture

I try to attach the texture on the eyebrows, but it has the same issue as the dress did, however, it is kind of impossible to clean up the mesh of the eyebrow, so I still need to think and try if there is another way to do it.

Before that, I notice the polygons are not separate correctly, so I rename them and assign correct texture on them

[kii-blog]

Attempting to Model the Boots

According to the character design I drew, there are tips on the boots. Since Vroid is not able to make any customisation on the boots, I decide to model in Maya.

But I’m not familiar with modelling and the mesh on the shoe are all triangles rather than squares. The result doesn’t turn well, so I think it’s better not to do this now.

[kii-blog]

Facial Animation

Working on the facial animation with the shape editor.

Since the character’s face is basically built by opacity maps, I need to use rendering viewport to check the facial expression when every time I make a change.

[kii-blog]

Working on Opacity Map

Opacity map is probably my favourite part of this project.

Opacity map shows more detail of the character.

I roughly know how the opacity maps work from the previous experiments, but I am not sure about the details, so I change the level of the shading.

Here is the final result.

[kii-blog]

Assigning Texture Again

Since I went back to work in Vroid again, the texture also needs to be assigned again.

[kii-blog]

Adjusting The Animation of Hands And The Wand

Motion capture doesn’t capture the finger movement, so I need to manually animate the finger.

I quickly model a wand and make it parent to the wrist, but as the first image, the way of holding the wand is not the way I want, so I draw myself an image to help.

Here is the work in progress of set the fingers at the correct position.

After that, since the character model is not completely the same with the motion capture actor, so the movement of the arms and wrists are needed to adjust too.

Like the image I show above, the wand is in her head, so I need to twist the elbow or the shoulder,

[kii-blog]

Restart Again and It Works!

At least it works this time, although I have been restarting so many times.

This time I do nothing to the model. As soon as I import the model to Maya and I assign the skeleton to human IK, then I send the scene immediately to MotionBuilder.

So It works! The character model is following the action! 

[kii-blog]

The Mesh Is Not Sent Properly to MotionBuilder

So here I am with another restart.

The skeletons are working, so I send the whole scene to MotionBuilder, but the error comes up.

The mesh is not entirely sent to MotionBuilder. The error message indicates that the mesh has history on, so it can not be sent.

 I think the reason is that I combine and rename all of the polygons (since there are too many unnamed polygons). The combination creates history, but if I delete history, the skeleton would be not working.

So another restart, but this time I will do nothing to the model.

[kii-blog]

The Skeleton Is Not Working

After I rename and create all of the blendshapes, the skeletons are not working any more, so I restart again.

I think the reason is I combine the polygons and delete the history.

[kii-blog]

Creating Blendshapes and Testing

After rename all of the facial blendshapes, I create the blendshapes. This is the testing to check everything is working.

[kii-blog]

Restart from OBJ file

I have been assigning texture on the fbx file for a bit long time, but since the blendshapes are not working and the skeletons were not good enough, I decided to export an obj file from Blender and restarted again.

Renaming all of the polygons to make the further working faster and smoother.