Motion Capture Scene Breakdown

This scene was a personal project made during my spare time at FutureGames. My goal was to learn how to work with Motion-Capture & MotionBuilder, as well as setting up a realtime cinematic sequence in Unreal Engine.

The characters/rigs were borrowed from the Paragon assets.

Raw Mocap Data

As I wasn't able to record any mocap data myself I searched through the internet + our school server and was able to find a few takes which inspired this idea.
I then took these takes, applied them to the rigs and arranged them in Motionbuilder's story tool. I also matched the takes to make sure they were somewhat correctly placed in the world.

Blending Clips

Then it was time to start blending the clips together. Here I was mostly looking at the timing while also trying to get the blends to look as good as possible, or at least to a state were I can work with them.

If I had done it today I definitely would've spent a bit more time in story mode working on the blends, which could've helped save time + give a better final result.

Correction Pass

Once I had blends that was working I plotted everything down to the control rigs. I then started correcting some poses & movements to be closer to what I was after.
I also began fixing most of the footsliding, to make this process easier I wrote a simple script (Feet_Sliding.py) to copy the position from the previous frame and paste it on the current frame. All footsliding was corrected on it's own layer so I later could turn down the weight of that layer in order still keep some of the original rotation in the feet, not giving them a dead feeling.

Polish + Rendering

Here I made smaller tweaks, removing any pops & cleaned up some of the arcs. I also animated the hair, bag & the phone.
For the hair I made a simple rig setup where I constrained some markers together, and the phone was just constrained to his hand until the end where I turned off the constraint & animated it falling to the ground.

Once the shot was ready I brought it into Unreal Engine 4 to light and render it.
I used Unreal's cinematic sequence to setup the scene and animate the doors + the UV coordinates for the floor plan display.

I'd like to end this by give a special thanks to Jonas Wallin & Morris Belfrage for giving me some pro tips and tricks for MotionBuilder,
as well as Jack Parson for giving me some killer lighting tips.