McWannabe wrote:
Michael - looking at the motion capture files I'm using in JimmyRig (from the free CMU motion capture library), the head motion seems necessary for any realism.
Yes, I agree with you there. What I do is track the movement on low res first, then I go frame by frame and move the head around and Pose refit it on High Res. Sometimes, when the head does not move alot, I can set the head and just run the tracking at High Res until the head moves more. Setting the head in the right spot also makes all of the rest of the body snap perfectly into place. Yeah, this makes the process alot longer than just not tracking the head, but the end result is far superior.
Now, I do most of my clean up also in the IPI program. I have found that fixing bad arm movements manually and then going through and blending any weird movements out manually makes for alot better results and an extremely realistic end movement. I'm not talking about just turning the Trajectory Filtering up when I export the file. After I run the Jitter removal, I again go frame by frame, and If I see any jumps of any of the parts, then I turn up Trajectory Filtering, copy and paste, and that smoothes out that jump in that frame without affecting the whole animation. As I'm sure many of you have seen, occassionally, the arm or whatever will do a 360. Using the technique of blending, as I just mentioned, can fix these 360 spins.
It would be nice to see the pose tab window look more like a graph of the parts motion, rather than just numbers.