Mixing animations from Mixamo.com

[asnowcappedromance]

Hey what's up guys?

I discovered this amazing website https://www.mixamo.com/ where you can download free animated characters as .fbx files.
Because the animations clips in Mixamo are pretty short, I'd like to combine several animations in order to get a longer sequence, but I have no idea how to approach this.

The FBX comes in with a bone hierarchy, as well as a Geometry OBJ which contains a locked file SOP connected to a locked Bone Capture SOP, which is then connected to a Capture Override SOP which again is connected to a Bone Deform SOP.
I assume that this is pretty standard.
So if I now import a second animation, I get a new OBJ containing the same Bone OBJ hierarchy but with a different animation.
What is the approach to blend the 2 different animations together? And how would I offset such an animation? In CHOPs?

Again, this is not my comfort zone in Houdini, I'd appreciate some pointers on how to get this done!

Thanks,

Manu

[Atom]

Here is how I do it, and it is a lot of fun to blend clips together.

Drop down an Agent node inside a SOP network and browse to your FBX. The Agent node acts kind of like a File node in this case. Then follow it up with a TimeWarp and an Unpack. The unpack is only needed if you plan on using the blendshapes node to blend two agents together. Use a transform for the second blended agent to get it as close to the first agent for the most seamless blend possible. When the shapes crossover try to have the end pose as close the new start pose as possible. Often a series of FBX animations will start and end with the same pose making it easy to pick up where you left off from clip to clip.

 

You can also just animate a Switch between two agents whose start and end frames are very similar.

Edited September 11, 2017 by Atom

[asnowcappedromance]

Hey man, 

Thanks a lot for the detailed screenshot, I'll have a play first thing tomorrow!
Kinda off topic, how are you liking those Ryzens? Better than Xeon or I7?

Cheers!!!

 

Edit:

I rebuilt your setup and it works like a charm, thanks a lot for pointing me towards the right direction!!

Edited September 12, 2017 by asnowcappedromance

[scorpes]

Any way to do this on bone level? I need to mix or rather append different fbx animations, but I would like to keep the bones.

[blendingshadow]

Hey,

@asnowcappedromance I was wondering how you went about this. I have been looking at the same thing but seem to have hit a snag. 

I am trying to have a character run, shoot and change their 'aim' as they run. Imagine the character hunting a small creature on the ground. 

I have the turning with rifle and rifle gunplay (running and shooting) animations. I have constrained a rifle model to the shooting animation to have it move. The pose / animation clip blending is pretty awkward though. I used the time warp to offset one of the animations and then a switch to toggle to the next animation. After the switch I use another timewarp to remap the animation to try and 'blend' the animations better but it's very clunky. 

I downloaded the fbx files with the skin and imported them seperately and then used an 'extract' node on the mesh to get to the above workflow.

Did you download the skins as well with the fbx? Or did you download a model and then the animations seperately? 

Trying to find a way to blend these animations more seamlessly and also tweak certain parts to have it look / aim at different areas.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Ta

[asnowcappedromance]

Hey man,

I did it exactly how Atom described it up top. I downloaded several animation clips from Mixamo as FBX and then used timeshift SOPs and the Blendshape SOP in order to blend the animation clips. Pretty easy!
Just try to replicate what Atom did, that should work for sure!

Cheers,

Manu

[Roko]

Hello,
I tried everyhing, but I cannot get it running.

Could you give more infos, please, how exactly to setup a character with multi clips from mixamo?

With a switch, I can switch from one clip to another, but I dont get it in a sequence, one clip after the other.

And a even more advanced question: When the first clip changes the position and rotation of the character, how can the second clip start at this new position and rotation? Every clip starts at the origin. I would like to combine couple clips and get a path.

I don´t want to make all clips stationary.

 

 

[jonah@jonahtobias.com]

Delve into Agent Transition Graphs.  Its pretty complicated to set up but worth it because of the sophisticated blending between characters with the same underlying rig it allows. Ive done it with mixamo animated rigs and it works well!

[tagosaku]

I also did mesh level deform by blend shape. It works well, but has limitation to mix/blend nicely.  anyway I just put screen captures here and some headup.

1 - some artists use agent node to import, but I used 'import FBX'. It creates mesh, bone, and material shader automatically better than agent SOP. I guess Agent SOP is good to apply a mixamo animation to own character.

2 - When importing mixamo FBXs, I noticed houdini apply TAKEs. I am not familiar with the TAKE, so I cleaned up animation in separate files, and open new session file.

3 - I wonder how to export alembic file with subframe interpolation. Before exporting, a character has smooth animation with float playback > turn off integer frame value. However, after importing it with alembic SOP, animation does not show smooth animation anymore because subframe interpolation is gone. I don't know why it happens, so I just cached with increment set to 1 to 0.1 rop alembic output SOP, in order to bake all subframes.  

 

My questions are:

4 -does anyone explain how to mix/blend animation with bone level clearly? 

5 -How to export alembic file with subframe interpolation ?

Thanks!

 

[Sepu]

Have a look at this from Adam, might help. 

https://gumroad.com/adamswaab#hsluC