Austriania
(2022)
After an exhausting day, when she wakes up in the train, she ends up being in a strange environment and meets someone whom she has never expected.
Role:
Unreal Engine 5 setup, Vicon calibration, Metahuman set-up.
Body & face tracking, retargeting, character head replacement, environment set-up & prop animation, and animation cleanups.
Software: Vicon, Rokoko, Motion Builder, Unreal Engine 5
Character: Metahuman & Mixamo
Environment: Unreal marketplace
Challenges
It was my first time capturing using Metahuman, which creates quite a lot of problems during retargeting as the skeletons are much more complex compared to Mixamo models, especially when comes to facial capture.
Another issue that came along was head replacement as we wanted to put a Metahuman head on top of a Mixamo body mesh, which resulted in unwanted clippings.
Solutions
After experimenting with different techniques and software combinations, my teammate and I decided to to retargeting in Unreal 5 directly instead of going through Motion Builder. It was tided but works well after finishing. For facial capture, we used Rokoko facial capture and recording in Unreal in real time to avoid reimport/export. Unfortunately, this was not working well when we were doing body capture, so we act again for facial animation while referring to previous body captures.
For head replacement, it connected well with the body mesh during walking and turning, but the hair starts to clip with the neck and collar when standing still, so I decided to remove the body and shoot a super close-up shot for the ending.