mocap in blender

This is a page with a few ideas about things that could be added/modified in blender that would really help people that work with mocap data.

Better IPO smoothing

There is a function in Blender now that smoothes an IPO curve, but really it just flattens it, what you want is for the overall IPO to retain it's shape. Then you want to remove "jitter"... The small discrepancies along your curve.

IPO curve fitting

I don't know if this is the right term. The thing about mocap data is that you get 1 key for every frame for every bone for every recorded value. This means that though you may have lots of detail it's hard to manipulate the data. So really you want a way to transform the messy original data to a very nice clean curve with the least ammount of keys possible.

Relative actions

Currently every action is relative to the bone's origin. This means that for instance if we have one action that is "walk forward" and another that is "turn right"... we may get the following...

"walk forward"... then we want to apply "turn right" and after that "walk forward" again... but as soon as we apply "turn right" which also has location data in it... the armature returns to it's original position. It would be excellent if it were possible to animate a character by manipulating actions only, and "relative actions/ipos" would be a great help.

Action influense/manipulation

Currently we can set a start/end/fade in/fade out on an action. But it would be great if you could also set the percentage of influense for an entire action block. It would also be better if we could manipulate all this in a more graphic/intuitive way.

Right now we manipulate action blocks through the transform window a lot, which is nice, but it would be nicer if for instance....
1. select the middle of an action block to move the entire block
2. select the middle of a side of the action block to "crop" the action
3. select a top corner and drag to adjust fade in/out (creates a line which you can select at it's corner to adjust)
4. select the top and drag down to adjust overall influense (creates a line which you can select/drag to adjust)

Retargeting

If you have worked with mocap somewhat... you will know about retargeting. Basicly think... if you record a person with short legs... and apply it to a rig in blender with relatively long legs... the motion of the character will have the legs slipping on the floor in all directions (poking through the floor even).

Automated retargeting would be an awesome addition!

IPO editing

It would be a definite improvement if IPO curves could be edited like the bezier curves in the 3d view... Meaning, relative to a cursor, with proportional edit... all the tools that we have in the 3d view.