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TOTAL DURATION: 1h 1m 59s

Learn how to use Houdini’s KineFX character tools and a TOP network to retarget the Carnegie Mellon University Graphics Lab Motion Capture Database to match a rig of our choosing. This lesson includes a workflow for procedurally removing noise from the mocap data and a description on how to turn your KineFX rig into an agent for crowd simulations. This workflow provides a template for converting old crowd animations onto a new skeleton.

Learn what is going to happen in this lesson and required prerequisites and resources. There will also be a quick overview of the scene file.
The goal in this lesson is to set up a sop network to retarget a single mocap clip. This will act as testing ground before you use PDG to retarget the entire database.
Here you will use a topnet to drive the retargeting sop network. In order to iterate over all the motion clips in the database, you need to create the attributes that will drive the retargeting sop network. You will review the TOPs required to download and decompress the CMU archive.
Now that you have created attributes to drive the retargeting network you can cache and render each motion clip. Once the rendering is complete, make videos of each clip. There is also an optional section exploring how to clean up your source and temporary data.
Often when processing motion capture data there can be noise in the motion of the skeleton. After converting mocap data to a motion clip, you can smooth selected joints in the animation in an effort to remove unwanted noise from the incoming mocap.
Learn how to use a new technique to smooth the motion of our animation. A new feature in Houdini 19.5, the smooth motion SOP gives you another means of removing noise from mocap.
One of the obvious applications of retargeting an existing animation library is to reuse the animation for a new crowd simulation. Learn how to take one of the clips you’ve retargeted and use it in a crowds system. In older versions of Houdini, you were limited to importing your animation as .fbx, .usd or from /obj. Now you are able to use kinefx as a means of importing this animation to crowds, which gives you much more flexibility to edit and modify your animation in sops.

CREATED BY

lucap1
LUCA PATARACCHIA

Senior Production Consultant

More from Luca Pataracchia

COMMENTS

  • rookyspooky 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

    Great explanation! Somehow I am stuck at the "make videos" part. FFmpeg is installed is there a version which is mandatory?

    Cheers.

  • lucap1 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

    There are some notes on installation in the help: https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/top/ffmpegencodevideo.html

    setting this up with packages is probably the way to go: https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/ref/plugins.html#using_packages

    I'm launching houdini from cygwin on windows which seems to find ffmpeg automatically.

    • thomas_english 1 year, 6 months ago  | 

      Unable to download the project file unfortunately

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      • Artheaduck41 3 weeks, 5 days ago  | 

        What is this Carnegie Mellon University? I've never heard of it. Do they teach online courses? Studying online is difficult, especially at university, so I even sometimes looked for a writing service and https://edubirdie.com/ helped me with this. In fact, I would like to find a full course somewhere and take it. But I can't find it yet. I like your videos, but I want something else in addition.

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