Cinema 4d Plugin Serial Unfurl
Orestes Hardy
When the red carpet is rolled out from the Palais des Festivals on Tuesday, the 77th Cannes will unfurl against a backdrop of war, protest, potential strikes and quickening #MeToo upheaval in France, which for years largely resisted the movement.
But the spotlight at the start may fall on Judith Godrche. The French director and actor earlier this year said the filmmakers Benot Jacquot and Jacques Doillon sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager, allegations that rocked French cinema. Jacquot and Doillon have denied the allegations.
So I say the ultimate kind of tongue in cheek because this is cg and there's a million different ways to do anything in cg, right? So this workflow is just one way to do retargeting of motion capture to characters in Cinema 4d. And it is the way that I do it. It's the way that I would recommend you do it, but that doesn't mean this is the only workflow to do retargeting, right?
So in this video, we're gonna go soup to nuts. We're gonna take a character, we're gonna rig it on Mixamo. Although this workflow can work with any rigged character, with any skeleton. If you made it yourself or bought it online, we're just gonna use Mixamo as it's a good kind of default on which to learn these principles. And also because beyond just doing the regular retargeting we're gonna do in Cinema, I'm gonna walk you through a Mixamo control rig workflow where you can edit your motion capture really easily in Cinema 4d. And that just works best with Mixamo skeletons. So without further ado, let's get into it.
Okay, so here we are. I've already recorded some motion capture into the new Rokoko studio. So this workflow will work with mocap you've recorded into Studio Legacy or even Rokoko video motion capture from our new AI motion capture tool. It doesn't really matter, this workflow will work for any of those. But as you can see, you know, here we go. Do my fingers, give a little wave, gotta do my karate kicks, you know, jump around a little bit and then yeah, patting the top of my head. And you can see that I don't quite make contact also with the clap and that's because, you know, that's typical of an inertial motion capture suit. It's an approximation of your data of your motions, right? So there's gonna be instances where you don't actually touch the top of your head or a body part or for clapping, you know, this is, you'll often find things like this that you need to correct and that's why it's so important that we're gonna be going through and showing off some mocap editing techniques as well for this workflow.
So, okay, so we need to export this out. So I'm just gonna go and I've already renamed it, add it to the export list, and we're going to export out an fbx. We don't need a body mesh, we don't need a face because we're only doing body and finger data. And for the skeleton preset, we're gonna select Human IK but you can also use Mixamo or Rokoko Newton. I wouldn't use Unreal Engine but I like using human IK. I find it's just very reliable and versatile as a skeleton. So that's what I'm going to be using and that's what I typically use under preset overrides. I'm gonna go under rest pose and I'm going to change this to a T pose. And in theory you shouldn't need to do that, but I find it's good to, to to, to add that for the rest pose under more settings. You know, frame rate 30, it can be a hundred, it doesn't really matter. This is where it's going to export out. And now we can export our clips out.
There we go. So while this is exporting, we can look at the model that we're gonna be using. So I just went on to Sketch Fab, I found an OBJ model, this cool Spidercat A pose. We're just gonna be using this as a demo, but we're gonna be rigging this character using Mixamo and that's just because I find it's a good place. You know, you could use this workflow for characters that don't have Mixamo skeletons. But especially for the control rig workflow we're gonna be going through at the end, this character needs to be rigged with a Mixamo skeleton. So that could be, you know, characters from Mixamo or you could upload your own, right? And I've already gone and uploaded our Spidercat character, you know, that process of the auto rigger put on the points onto the characters, different, the wrists and everything, and then hit process. And then once it's done, we're just gonna go and load in a T pose again. So here we go, T poses. And we can download that, which I have done and I've already put into my little raw folder here.
So now we can open up Cinema 4D and let's get into it. I'm using Cinema 4D 2023. It's fantastic by the way, but this should work on older versions of Cinema 4D. It uses the character definition tag, which was introduced, I believe around R 21 or R 23, maybe R 22. But this should be pretty backwards compatible. Certainly if you're on R 23, this workflow should work in, in its entirety.
Okay, so here we go. Gonna get rid of my octane. So we don't need that. So the first thing that we need to do is go and import a character and that character that we downloaded from Sketch Fab, we're gonna go grab that. So I'm actually gonna go to file merge objects, go grab our Spidercat, open it up, import it so it's a little bit small. So what we can do to fix that is we're gonna go into our project and we go into our scale and we'll just say project scale in millimeters or no, we'll keep it in centimeters, but we'll scale project current scale target scale is 10. So that should make it just a little bit bigger. And if we want to compare that, so maybe we make it 20. So let's undo that. Go back and I'm hitting Control D to get to my project settings. Let's scale Project 20.
So if we just wanna retarget this the first thing that we can do is go into our character and right click on our character's hips. And actually let's again, alt G we'll create a no, we'll call it a Spidercat and I just wanna keep things clean. And then we'll right click on the Mixamo rig and we're gonna go to rigging tags character definition. And so this is first we're gonna go through straight retargeting and then we'll do the control rig workflow after this.
So once I've added that character definition, if I hit open manager, this is where we need to tell Cinema 4d which bones are which on our character. So because this is a Mixamo character, if we just hit extract skeleton, you can see it went through and it did a really good job of figuring out which things are which. This skeleton's actually a little bit weird because it was rigged with only four fingers. But that should be fine for, for our purposes. But if you had a skeleton that if you hit extract skeleton and nothing showed up, you can always go in manually and, you know, add in all the bones that you need to. So we could go in and let's say we didn't, if I hit control, hold down control and click on hips we can unfurl the whole thing. But if we went to the spine and let's say nothing was here, you know, or or nothing populated throughout the whole thing, we would go through one by one, right? We click on spine and hey, we'd go and we'd grab all the spine bones, right? Or we'd go through and we'd click on neck and if there was nothing here, we would go and we'd find the neck and we'd click neck and add it in, right? And we'd do that for all of these different bones. So that is all good.
So the last thing that we need to do is we need our character to be in a T pose and this character is again, but if your character was not, you need to go through and change all the bones around and just position your character into a T pose because your character needs to be in a T pose for this workflow. And beyond just a T pose, we also want to make sure that, especially with Mixamo characters, that our thumbs are lying flat against the hand. And that just will help out with thumb placement later. So I'm gonna go and grab the thumbs, right? And you'll see when we import our mocap, we are just trying to get this character in as close a pose to what our mocap's initial pose is as possible because everything is relative when you do retargeting. Any differences between the initial poses will reflect throughout the whole, when we copy over the mocap, it will all be off by how different the poses are, right? And so we can see this in effect when we import our mocap. So after we're done posing our character and making sure it's in a T pose and fixing the thumbs, we can hit set reference pose. So that's going to be the reference pose for this character.
Okay, so now let's go and let's import our motion capture. So again, we'll go to file merge objects, we're gonna go find our mocap, which is right here. Retargeting demo. And you can find where your mocap is saved if you didn't put a destination by just going to open folder. So I went and copied this, right? And then I went into Cinema and I pasted it in here. And here's our mocap retargeting demo. We'll open that up. Here it comes and look at that. We got some motion capture. We'll expand out, let's expand out this timeline about six 40. And there we go. We got our mocap. So how do we get this motion capture onto our character? Well, we're gonna go and we're gonna do the same thing we just did for our character, which is create a character definition on the hips. So right click the hips, rigging tags, character definition, open manager and extract skeleton. And so because we used a human IK skeleton from Rokoko Studio, it was extracted just fine. So that should really never be a problem. You shouldn't have to go in and do it manually for your Rokoko skeleton. And again, set reference pose and you can even look at our mo cap's hands. See, so that's what I was saying about the difference in our character. And you can actually see, so our character went back to this pose and that's because with the, with the thumbs here, that's because when you download from Maximo, there's a couple key frames. So if we right click on our character's hips, we go down to select children, select all of the characters' bones, and then I can just go to coordinates and shift click, select all of these animation, delete track, it gets rid of all the key frames and just leaves it on that frame.
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