We're open for Business!

It’s taken us much longer to get here than we had originally hoped but we are now finally ready to launch our new motion capture library and online store! Our goal is to create fun and useful motion capture animations for use by 3D Artists and Game Developers. We have built a large library of animations up over the years for our own internal projects, selling our data primarily in online virtual worlds and other online game/social platforms. Some of you may already know of our virtual world content creation brand Abranimations®. Most of our library has previously only been processed for these platforms, we are working through the library now selecting content and cleaning it for a wider audience. We will also be creating some completely new motion capture sets in the near future which will appear here first.

Here’s a quick dancing character video to celebrate!

A BIT ABOUT OUR WEBSITE

Our website features a growing library of motion capture animations that have been carefully cleaned and processed for use in a variety of applications and game engines. With each animation, we include a number of additional files retargeted and processed for specific applications. We're not able to include conversions for every application that exists, but there are certain formats that we get asked for quite regularly. Where it makes sense we have included supplementary files for these or instructions how to convert from the main fbx files.

You will find a free sample pack of dances that we encourage all our customers to download and try before purchasing any content we sell to ensure they are suitable for your animation pipeline. Please also make sure to read our EULA too and the License FAQs, as there are a few specific usage restrictions with our animations.

The files we include with our animations are as follows...

mocap android

 Primary FBX Format

The primary format our animations come in is FBX at 60fps retargeted to our Android Character. This core character as had the most cleanup and processing so will be the most 'precise'. This file should work in most applications that do not require a specific bone hierarchy. We have tested it in a variety of applications including Autodesk Software (Maya, Mobu etc) and Blender. It can also be used in the Unity Game Engine see below.


We also include the following supplementary file format conversations at no extra cost. Please bear in mind that all of these are retargeted animations from the original FBX so there will be some variation. Whilst we include these files as extras to help get up and running quickly with your project most of our time is focused on the original FBX file.

Unreal Engine Mocap

Unreal Engine FBX

When we looked at Unreal we found the import and retargeting within Unreal was somewhat more complex than Unity, especially if you want to use root motion from the animation. As a result we have included an FBX file specific to Unreal Engine (It can also be used with Unity, but I would recommend using the Core FBX file as this is a step closer to the original processing we preformed.) You will find the model in our Unreal FBX file is our own. This is because we are not allowed to distribute the UE mannequin. However the skeleton inside follows the same bone hierarchy and will import into Unreal Engine without the need for extra special retargeting steps. The Unreal FBX is 30FPS and does include root motion (ie. The rotation is in the hips, but translation is in the root). Root motion of course is not always necessary or required, but the option is there. As I understand it, after import you do not have to use it!

Please check our help section for full instruction on importing into Unreal Engine

Unity Game Engine

The primary FBX file will work in Unity as will the Unreal FBX if you prefer to use this. You can use the Unity Mecanim system to import and automatically retarget the animation within Unity. We have a tutorial in the help section of our site detailing the import and setup process in Unity.

Please check our help section for full instruction on importing into Unity and setting up Mecanim

Daz3D Biovision Hierarchy (Bvh)

One format we get asked for frequently is Biovision Hierarchy (aka Bvh), usually for use in Daz3D. Bvh is a pretty old mocap format. I do not know of many programs that still use it much except Daz3D, Poser and the virtual world 'Second Life'. Providing a Bvh file for Daz is somewhat problematic as it has no standard bone hierarchy and Daz has lots of characters. We decided to look at the most popular Daz characters and provide ready retargeted bvh files for them. They are as follows...

Genesis 1 - Should also work with Genesis 2 characters.
Genesis 8 - Should also work with Genesis 3 characters.
Victoria 4 - We included this as people still use the character in Daz, but also because it is a somewhat simpler bone hierarchy than the others which may also be useful in some other situations.

It is worth bearing in mind the animations we have retargeted are for female characters. They should still work fine on the male Genesis / Michael 4 characters though. You may find the animations need some tweaking if they do not look exactly right.

Due to all the complexity and issues with bvh, The Daz files should be considered 'Experimental'. Please do not be surprised if you run into errors or have difficulty!

On one final note, before importing into Daz I highly recommend you review our help page first. There are a number of tricky issues when importing due to characters having bone limits on by default that need turning off. You may also need to drop the character to the floor after import.

Please check our help section for full instruction on importing our bvh files into Daz3D

 

iClone7

We have included iClone '.rlmotion' files that can be used in iClone7. They might work in earlier versions but I have not been able to test. These iClone files are based off our original FBX animation. We used Reallusion 3DXchange to convert them. As our Android character is not a standard iClone model you may find some things do not look quite right, especially when using them on an iClone native character. Small adjustments are fortunately easy to make using iClones Motion Layer. We have included a short tutorial for this in our tutorials section.

( Please Note: The dancing girl character in the image is not included. This is an illustrative render only to show an animation on an iClone Character )

3DMax

I'm not entirely sure how much 3DMax bipeds are still used these days. It is a file format though that we've been occasionally asked for. The process of converting to 3DMax is a little tricky and requires retargeting to the correct biped skeleton and then converting in Max to a biped. To help we have included bip files where we have already done this retarget/convert step so they should be ready to use in your 3DMax projects. The biped skeleton they were retargeted to has similar proportions to our Android Characters skeleton so the motion should match reasonable closely.

 As well as our library we plan to add lots of tutorials and help in an ongoing basis that will be useful in the use of our data as well as motion capture in general.

At the time of writing we are not currently offering custom motion capture but if there is anything you would like to see added to the library in the future please do drop us a line and we will look into it. We may open up the studio again in the future for custom capture but we currently have no Time Scales in place for this.

Our focus for now is building this library on our site.

  - Jim Clark
Awesome Dog Mocap