Feature Focus: Motion Library

[Jeff Almasol]

Introducing the Motion Library, a new Character Animator behavior. The Character Animator Motion Library (powered by Mixamo) is a library of 350+ full-body character animations, captured from professional motion actors. Dance moves ranging from ballet to hip hop can be applied with one quick selection. Sports moves from basketball to bowling are super simple. And a range of walking, running, and jumping are also available. Moves that were difficult to animate are now within everyone’s reach.

Tutorial

Check out this tutorial from Okay Samurai:

Puppets to use with the Motion Library

Use these example puppets.

Requirements

• Puppets must have Body, Motion Library, and Limb IK behaviors applied to the same layer.
• Full body puppets with typical human dimensions work the best.
• Body behavior must be picking up relevant body handles properly. Body behavior requires puppets with at least one arm (Head/Neck/Shoulder and Elbow/Wrist) to estimate the body scale.

Current rules

• Head and Waist: If tracked by Motion Library, Motion Library always wins.
• Other body handles: averages if tracked by both Motion Library and Body.
  • In this case, you may want to uncheck Head, Head Rotation, and Neck from Motion Library to make it look a bit better.
  • You may also want to Calibrate before testing the quality.

Set up

Add the Motion Library behavior. 

• Learn how to add a behavior 
• Learn more about all the behaviors 

Controls

Motion

Animate your puppet with any of over 350 motions. There are eight motion categories. Pick a category and then click the < > buttons to audition motions one after another.

Speed

Change the motion’s playback speed across the whole motion. The speed value is recorded into any take generated by Record One Motion. The default value is 100% (no speed change). The minimum value is 10% (10 times slower). The maximum value is 1,000% (10 times faster).

Note: Speed is not animatable. To change the speed of a motion, use the Manual Playback controls in the Advanced section.

Orientation

Change the angle of view for the 3D motion capture data as it’s applied to your 2D artwork. For example, a front-facing puppet might want a 90º offset compared to the default left-to-right walk. If the applied motion doesn’t look right (e.g., a head or wrist has too much rotation), tweaking this parameter might help improve your results.

Preferred Orientation

Use the “best” 3D orientation of the motion captures as a starting point. Otherwise, the motion capture’s default angle is used.

Mirror

Flip the motion data horizontally.

Root Motion

Specify how your puppet’s overall position behaves during the animation cycle:

• Reset at loop resets your puppet to its initial position.
• Continuous loops the local motion with your puppet’s global position continuing where it left off. This is useful for continuous animation cycles such as walking (or dancing!) off the screen.
• Treadmill leaves the puppet in place and performs the animation cycle as if walking on a treadmill.

Tracked Handles

Specify the handles that the captured motion is applied to. If the same handles are also tracked by Body Tracker (specified by Tracked Handles in the Body behavior), the handle transforms get averaged, except for Head and Waist which are controlled solely by Motion Library.

Advanced

Select Manual Playback to control the playback of all the motions in your timeline manually. The Playback Dial value cycles through the entire animation for each 360. For example, you can keyframe the Manual Playback dial to have a cycle ease in and out of an animation.

Record One Motion / Reset Position

Record One Motion captures all the current motion parameters and creates a new take in the timeline for one cycle of that motion. The new take will have the name of the recorded motion; view the tooltip to see any additional parameters that were captured at the time of the recording. Extend or trim the motion in the timeline to change the duration; create multiple overlapping takes with new motions and blend them.

Reset Position resets the puppet’s location to its original starting point. This is helpful if the puppet has danced out of the scene. 🙂

Known issues and limitations

No known issues. Please let us know if you encounter any problems.

What we want to know 

We want to hear about your experience with Motion Library:  

• What are your overall impressions?  
• What do you think about the Record One Motion workflow?
• Do the parameter names make sense to you?

 

Also, we’d love to see what you create with Motion Library. Share your animations on social media with the #CharacterAnimator hashtag. 

Thank you! We’re looking forward to your feedback. 

 

Use this Beta forum thread to discuss Motion Library and share your feedback with the Character Animator team and other Beta users. If you encounter a bug, let us know by posting a reply here or choosing “Report a bug” from the “Provide feedback” icon in the top-right corner of the app.

[HouHouHou]

Motion Library looks awesome; maybe Walk will be consolidated there. But judging by the preview video, your team is creating another complication of the type CH is already full of. Simply put, if I want to control the strength of a selected Motion Library dance, why do I have to go to a separate behavior's panel (Body) to do it? I'd rather look at one big, consolidated Body panel with Motion Library and Limb IK inside. 

We already have to remember or write down "if this, then this" flow charts to achieve positive outcomes.

Another example is having to click off "Initial Foot Pinning" in Limb IK--even if Limb IK is unarmed--to allow the Dragging of an ankle. Or if I've added an extra head level and tag for better head tilting, it ruins Body Tracking, so I have to remember to temporarily turn off that "head."

I wish your team would work more on consolidating the app's existing functions and panels for less clicking around and eliminate conflicting behaviors (or behaviors that get confused by some rigging when others need it).

But I still don't get why I can easily scroll around a PS image with two fingers on my trackpad but have to hold down Option in CH or Spacebar in AE to do the same thing.

[j-saito]

Hi,

Thanks for your interest in Motion Library!

Let us go to specifics first.

1. Strength parameter in Body behavior - This is a great candidate to consolidate in Motion Library. Thank you for your suggestion. This was mostly my hindsight. I did not think the strength parameter is going to be so useful. It turns out it is very handy for quickly customizing the preset animations. We will most likely do this in our next update!
2. "Initial Foot Pinning" - In the beta app, we recently updated its default to be off. We also updated the beta app so the foot pinning takes effect only when there are no animations on heels. We hope to push this change to the official release app soon so this option will not interfere with the animations.

Now, let us discuss the general technical design.

We are consciously taking the modular component approach for our recent behaviors. Walk behavior, as you say, is an all-in-one behavior. It has its own preset motions, it does animation retargeting, and it does IK. This seems to be convenient, but it turns out behaviors with this design become hard to reuse and they do not cooperate well with other behaviors. Breaking down this big monolithic block into smaller rigging pieces allows developers and riggers to reuse them. Limb IK can constrain any animations from Dragger, Transform, Body Tracker, Motion Library, and any way to animate which may come up in the future. Body behavior can now consume the input from Motion Library as well as Body Tracker. Motion Library focuses on its own recording model to leverage the looping animations from Mixamo for high-level animation editing, which would not be possible if Motion Library was a part of a single Body behavior doing everything.

While we have to take this modular design, this choice is more of an engineering and rigging convenience, not an animation convenience. One possibility to improve the general UX is to redesign the behavior panel so it looks different in the rig mode and the animation mode. We can certainly take small realistic steps by consolidating/eliminating specific parameters, like strength and foot pinning as you pointed out.

Thank you for your valuable feedback!

[Rares Molnar]

Hi!

I've been playing around with Motion Library lately and I've noticed some problems/issues which should be addressed before roll out:

1. It is essential to add in the Advanced Menu of the Motion library the option to adjust the movement amplitude individually for each body part: head, torso, left leg, right leg, left arm, right arm. I understand that you can not make it possible for us to edit those animations, but a "slide bar" (0 to 400% slide bar) adjustment is indispensable. Some animations work super well, but some need adjustment based on your puppet because are heavily exaggerated or need an amplification: ex: increase or decrease the amplitude of the left arm.

2. Multiple walking animations have problems with the foot (heel and toe) position. The animation is not working smooth and at some point the foot just jumps to another position instantly (on X axis).

3. The dynamic link between Adobe Character Animator and After Effects does not work at all. The scene is imported successfully, but the puppet is standing still even though the performance is there.

2. Many animations are not in a perfect loop (especially those which involve steps and X axis movement) which can cause serious problems when trying to create the animation. Even though I've adjusted the animations by Easing In and Out, there is still a noticeable X axis movement I can not get rid off. This is annoying because I can not integrate the animation in my creations and it becomes "useless". To replicate the scenario, use a standing still puppet and then blending in a waling animation. When the walking animation stops and the puppet is standing still again, it will jump some px on X axis. Most of the animations should have a perfect loop.

2. Catwalk animation (from idle category) is not working at all.

Please let me know what do you think about these points.

Thank you in advance!

[j-saito]

Hi,

Thanks for another feedback 🙂

1. This is very unlikely to happen anytime soon, given the design of the system. Please add animations with Dragger etc. if needed.

2. Perfect motion retargeting to stylized characters with free-style initial poses is an extremely challenging open problem. While there is no fundamental solution to this, I may be able to suggest rigging tips to minimize this if you can share your puppet and a screen capture of what you see as a problem.

3. Because you are working on CH beta, the other app must also be a beta app. Please try dynamic-linking with After Effects beta. I will request the team to make this clear to users with an error message.

4. Motions are as they are from Mixamo. Many Mixamo animations are looping animations, but not all of them. Many motions make sense as looping motions, some do not. You need to select the ones that suit your needs. We surely will not eliminate non-looping motions but we may consider clarifying which ones loop, and which ones do not.

5. Catwalk in idle: sorry, this is totally my bad. It should have been named "Catwalk Idle." If you want a "Catwalk" that actually walks, please go "Catwalk" in "Walk" category. We will fix this soon.

[j-saito]

> Many animations are not in a perfect loop (especially those which involve steps and X axis movement) which can cause serious problems when trying to create the animation.

Perhaps what you want is to set the root position to the "Continuous" mode. You can also try the "Treadmill" mode to completely eliminate the X movement.

[SouthbayJay]

Happy Sunday folks! 

Let me first just say holy WOW!! Absolutly love all 350 of the motion presets. 

So far I just have one question, is it possible to assign keyboard shortcuts to activate these motions quickly?

I apologize if this has already been asked I did search but didn't find anything. 

Thank you very much! I really appreciate all your efforts!

Jason

[Rares Molnar]

Hi! The only way you can assign keyboard shortcuts to motions is by creating Previews. Once you found a suitable motion for your puppet, hit Record one motion. Then simply create a preview using that motion. Please let me know if it helps! Cheers!

[j-saito]

Thanks Jason for trying out Motion Library, and Rares for helping other users!

Just to supplement the answer by Rares, I made a quick tutorial on making a trigger from a Motion Library motion and assigning a key to it. I hope this clarifies the workflow.

[GuillotinedChemistry]

Hi, I've noticed that changes I'm making in Limb IK to make a character look better don't seem to be translating when I then click on 'Record One Motion'. So any changes I made with, let's say, reversing an elbow bend, are gone when I play back the scence and hit it. 

I notice that the recorded motion librarty clips note the speed, ortientation, mirror and root position, but nothing else. Is Limb IK info not being saved? If it isn't, how would you recommend saving those choices and transfering them to the clip recorded from 'record one motion'? 

Thanks in advance. 🙂

[j-saito]

Hi,

Thank you for trying out Motion Library!

The only parameters baked into the Motion Library recording are what you see when you hover over the recording in the timeline like this:

All other parameters you want must be enabled for recording explicitly. The workflow will be similar to my attached video describing how to record Tracked Handles with Motion Library. In your case, you do the same for the Limb IK parameters you are interested in. If you do use the "Record One Motion" button, you will probably need to separately record the Limb IK parameters. In your case, it may be less confusing to record Motion Library and Limb IK parameters altogether by hitting the usual Record button (red circle above the timeline).

This parameter recording workflow is a general design of CH, not specific to Motion Library.

[GuillotinedChemistry]

Thank you for getting back to me. I'll have to try both of those ideas out next time I make a recording. I really appreciate the support you provide for character animator... it's an exciting program!