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.

[RaizelDesign]

A small bug that I'm encountering is that I have a puppet with big ribbons on her shoes that I had set a dangle handle to. It seems that dangle and motion library don't play nicely together. Not a huge issue, but disappointing and something to know about beforehand.

[j-saito]

Thank you for trying out Motion Library and taking time to report the problem here. We appreciate it if you can share your puppet so we can replicate and resolve your issue.

[j-saito]

Sorry, I just realized this forum does not allow attachments of .puppet files. I will ask around for ways to share puppets.

Meanwhile, here is the rendered movie of my rigging attempt. I used a recent feature "Leader/Follower" to attach a ribbon with dangles to Footy's right shoe. Seems to be working well with Motion Library.

[j-saito]

OK looks like the best way to share puppets is through Creative Cloud. Here is my example puppet attaching a dangling ribbon to Footy's right shoe. This works fine with Motion Library.

https://shared-assets.adobe.com/link/89bc9679-3e1c-4903-775b-6fdb4e414003

[RaizelDesign]

Another issue - but this may be something I'm rigging wrong and I'd like to hear if anyone else is encountering something similar. My puppet has a skirt set as an independent layer, attached to her torso. I've rigged quite a few puppets with skirts/dresses and usually after some tweaking, it moves along with the body naturally - this one was working before I tried playing around with Motion Library. However, now it seems to fall off the body with certain movements, like jumps. Anybody else working with a puppet that has clothing that have movement (skirts, wide pants, etc.) and having the same issue? Or NOT having any issues and knows how to get around this?

[j-saito]

Thank you again for trying out Motion Library. It sounds like your puppet uses an advanced rigging strategy for simulating garments. We would love to take a look at your puppet so we can fully replicate the case and make the best suggestion.

[RaizelDesign]

Thanks. I have three versions of the same puppet, one for full movement (the most complex one), one with fewer views for walk cycles, and one that I simplified to try out the motion library"

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9jc9a47x598mnfa/ELLA.puppet?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jlvjfvx0kcho9to/ELLA_walk.puppet?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/k9rv1hfxr7cbpty/ELLA_motion-library.puppet?dl=0

[j-saito]

Beautiful artwork! Quick comments:

• Consider making use of the Rigging Issues panel in the rig mode. Try to follow suggestions there as much as possible https://helpx.adobe.com/adobe-character-animator/using/rigging-issues.html
• For Motion Library/Body/Limb IK to work, your puppets need heels, not ankles. The draggable tag should also be on heels, not toes or ankles
• Because your puppet is a ballerina, consider increasing the Ankle Flexibility in Limb IK to a high number, like 90% or more

I am still in the process of understanding your art and rig structure. I will get back to you again once I am fully done with rigging to the level I am satisfied with.

Potential issues on our end:

• Puppets with many views are extremely slow. We may be able to optimize this. Meanwhile, please consider rigging with a minimal number of views

[RaizelDesign]

Thanks! The artwork isn't mine - I'm collaborating with another illustrator.

I'll take all that into consideration.

I put the heel tag off the actual artwork, because it was distorting the feet. I made believe that they're side view instead of tiptoes and the distortion stopped, but that's why I hadn't thought of putting the draggable on the heels as I normally do.

[RaizelDesign]

Thanks so much for the tip about ankle flexibility! I didn't realize that that was what was causing the flattening foot problem.

[Rares Molnar]

Hi! I want to say that those 350 animations are just
WOW, but I have some points which would
dramatically improve this feature in a practical manner:
1. The possibility to change, adapt or personalize the pre-made animation (ex: to change only the left arm position during the dance animation or to change the position of both legs during the idle animation).

2. Saving you own animation (creating a pre-made animation by your own) so you can use it across multiple projects and puppets.
3. Will the developers add more and more animations (during time, of course)? A household activities category would be also super useful.

4. The posibility of importing animations made by community members would add so much diversity and complexity to this system. It would be super useful if someone can use my eating animation and for me to import and use a sleeping animation made by another member.
6. I saw that the animations are a little bit laggy. It it because of the beta version of Character Animatior?

[j-saito]

Hi,

Thank you for trying out Motion Library! We just pushed a new beta build with many Motion Library improvements, most notably retargeting improvement and blending with Dragger, which very much relates to your first suggestion. If your time allows, please update the beta app and try it out again.

To customize the pre-made animation, there are three ways:

1.  NEW from the beta build v23.0.0.42 (2022-08-29): You can now layer Dragger animations on top of Motion Library. This averages the position from Dragger and Motion Library.
2.  To fully take over a body part (e.g. left arm) with your own Dragger animation without averaging, uncheck Left Wrist and Left Elbow under "Motion Library > Tracked Handles" (make sure to uncheck the ones of Motion Library, not Body)
3.  Adjust high-level parameters such as Speed, Orientation, and Body > Strength

> I saw that the animations are a little bit laggy

Can you be more specific here about what you mean by "laggy?" Screen capture of what exactly is happening always helps us to understand. If this is about the performance, we appreciate it if you can also share your hardware information and which puppet you are using to test. If this is about the speed of the animation, they are exactly the same as in Mixamo. If you need to speed up some animations, please use the Speed parameter.

As for importing user-created animations, this is one of our top requests. We will consider this for our future release. Meanwhile, if you have specific motions from Mixamo that you want to be added to the presets, please let us know. We will note your request on the household activities. If you can be specific about what household activities you are interested in, please let us know.

Thank you again, your feedback is invaluable to us.

[RaizelDesign]

Thanks for adding the option to layer dragger animation. But for when we want to fully take over a part - like unchecking the wrists and elbows when doing a walk motion so we can do our own thing with it - would it be possible to have that specific to every motion recording? For instance, I wanted my character to hold something while walking, so I unchecked the wrists and elbows, but then I wanted to use one of the wave gestures from the motion library, and I couldn't have the two recordings working in the same scene.

[j-saito]

Because the selections of "Tracked Handles" are separate recordable parameters not embedded into the Motion Library take, you need to separately record the parameters under "Tracked Handles" per segment that you want to override. Let me know if you need the full workflow of taking over different parts of the body in a sequence. I can have one of my colleagues record a video showing the workflow.

[RaizelDesign]

That would be helpful. Thanks.

[j-saito]

Here you go, a video on recording "Tracked Handles" and sequencing such animations. I ended up making the video myself. I hope the video makes sense.

Please keep in mind that this parameter recording workflow is the design of Character Animator, not specific to Motion Library.

For Motion Library, we tried to make the recording workflow as simple as possible by automatically embedding common parameters (everything visible, not grouped under Tracked Handles and Advanced). Embedded parameters have the disadvantage that they are not editable after recording. For Tracked Handles, we decided to not embed them into recordings and allow users to change them after recordings. This offers maximum flexibility at the cost of the additional care needed if users want to record with tracked handles unchecked.

[Rares Molnar]

Hello!

Here are some activities, which in my oppinion, Motion Library should contain:

Household activities:

Clothes washing

Cooking

Dish washing

Drilling

Ironing

Mopping

Shopping (cart/wheelchair pushing)

Shopping (caring bags)

Toilet cleaning

Vacuuming

Trash throwing

Window cleaning

Watering the plants

Making the bed

Taking an object from the shelf

Putting an object from the shelf

Dusting the furniture

Eating

Drinking

Sitting

Sleeping

Driving

Caring an object

Changing the bulb

Computer playing

Toy playing

Watching TV

Music listening

Having a shower

Playing instruments

Reading

Writing

Gardening

Teeth brushing

Hair combing

Praying

Phone using

Knee marriage proposal

Present unwrapping

Christmas tree decorating

Toilet sitting

Object throwing

Door opening

Walk:

Wheelchair walking (special needs person walking)

Sports:

Swimming

Fishing

Falling (on ground)

Parachuting

Bike riding

Skating

Yoga

Horse riding

Skiing

Climbing

Rollerblading

Surfing

Gesture:

Laughing

[Rares Molnar]

Hello again! This is what I mean by laggy. I am using a pretty good Windows laptop (94 bits), 32 GB RAM. The recording and the laptop specs are attached below.

[j-saito]

OK, Ninja is one of the slowest puppets because it has many views (profile, three-quarter, and frontal). It struggles on my top-of-the-line PC and Mac too. While we look into general performance issues, please also try other lightweight puppets like Hopscotch.

Thank you for a list of specific motions you want. Motions heavily depending on props and facial expressions are hard to fit right now because Motion Library focuses on Mixamo body motions only. For example, out of your requests, we already have "laughing" from Mixamo in the Idle category but without the facial expression, it is hard to tell what the motion is about. Nevertheless, we will discuss your suggestions with the team.

[Rares Molnar]

Thank you! I hope you will include some of them. 

[j-saito]

As for a falling motion, "Landing" in the Gesture category may be close to what you are looking for.

[RaizelDesign]

This is really helpful, thank you!

[Arjuna23353545ofev]

Do you have key frames to change manual movements? This would be a huge huge break through to custom key frame the movements. I only see transform simple moements. What if you wanna to key frame the movement animation. Modify it more custom so it can be even more unique.  Or manually make the movements on your own without motion capture using key frames based on pin point of the rigs. It would make things soo much easier for an animator.

[j-saito]

Thank you for your request!

Because this is a thread on Motion Library, I will first answer in the context of Motion Library.

Motion Library is meant for the high-level editing of animation. For example, you can bring in punch, kick, and idle motions and then reorder and stretch them as you like.

Your request for keyframing is a low-level editing feature. Usually, going from high-level editing to low-level editing requires baking the animation to keys and losing the high-level information. While this is in theory doable, this is not currently the focus of Motion Library. The closest low-level adjustment available to Motion Library is layering Dragger animation as discussed in the post started by Rares Molnar above.

Outside of Motion Library, Character Animator in general does not provide low-level editing after recordings but this is a frequent user request. I also personally wish there was a better infrastructure to edit Dragger and Body Tracker recordings with keyframing. I will note your request to the team.