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Blender Animation ReTarget Addon Tutorial

7

NRK writes:

This tutorial will show you how to use a new script I just finished writing that will take an armature with an animation on it and transfer that animation to another rig. The main advantage of this script is it transfers the animation in very customizable ways and allows you to tweak the transfer so you can adjust for differences between the character's physical characteristics. The script transfers keyframes so you have no ties to the original source when done and the animation can be further customized by the user by modifying the keyframes in blender. This script will work on any destination and source rig, but in this example we use a source rig created by the radical AI video to motion tracking service. The target rig is a makehuman character and all files can be viewed in the github link below. We use this script at Spark Studio for creating our films and recently converted all production over to Blender and started creating these scripts and videos for our pipeline.

You can get the script here.

About the Author

Nick Keeline

I am a 3D generalist and make my career in mechanical, electrical and software engineering. I play in the evenings at blender, 3d printing and programming. A few years back I developed the cloud generator in blender and like to 3d model and make.

7 Comments

  1. Nick, this is absolutely awesome stuff. Can you please explain how you solved the issue of globally rotating bones in Blender?

    • I may just make a tutorial on Quaternions since I learned a lot, I still feel like I know almost nothing about them. Basically I got the global position of the source bone and the current global position of the destination bone, calc'd the difference between the two, then applied that quaternion to the local position of the destination pose bone.

      • Oh, I see... but that only works when the two frames of reference are not rotated relative to one another.

        Euler angles cannot die fast enough. Given a parent bone and a child bone both oriented in the same reference frame, since Quaternions are associative, the inverse of the parent bone's rotation matrix multiplied by the child bone's rotation matrix is the rotation matrix that transforms the parent bone's reference frame to the child's. And from there it's analogous to multiplying the Euler rotations (in order) as you move down the chain of reference frames from parent to child, except there's only one matrix.

        I realize that since you got it to work, you know all of that; I thought it might be useful for anyone else thinking of manipulating bones like that.

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