The Tactical Toot

This project was made in my motion capture class with Michael Walsh at Texas A&M University. I took this class to expand my tech art skills into animation and retargeting. In this class, we learned all the ins and outs of MotionBuilder, and actually got to capture the motion in the volume ourselves!

After receiving the motion, I went through the process of cleaning up the bumps and imperfections in my character's movement. The Unreal character I decided to use was Paragon's Drongo, so I had to make sure that the motion didn't conflict with any of the gear he has on his body. In addition, Drongo is naturally hunched, so that had to be kept in mind when directing the actor while they were suited up.

My workflow involved baking each animation down to the skeleton and exporting them out as one FBX. This made it fairly easy to import into Unreal! All that I had to do was go through the retargeting menu and ensure the skeletons had the same bone hierarchy. From there, the rest of the project became camera work, environment layout, and rendering!

Here is the final product:

This project came in handy for a lot of the work that I was having to do at the LIVE Lab that semester. For a couple of months, my job essentially involved retargeting Mixamo animations to a custom character with a root bone so that we could use root motion lock in the game.

Overall, I learned so much about retargeting through this project and my work at the Lab! Would love to do it again, especially in a game context.