MotionBuilder Tutorial: Animating 2-Handed Weapons and Hand-Held Cameras

foreign so if you've been following along you know I'm attempting to recreate The Matrix Lobby shootout inside motion Builder so far we've done all our motion capture at home with an nvn link system and then in motion Builder we've blocked out the first scene using story tool animated the props using multi-ref constraints and then transformed my punch into Neo's punch using a control rig so in this video we're going to look how you can make your 200 prop animation more realistic creating share p

oses between different characters and files and add some realistic camera shake to one of our shots so let's get started so the first thing I did was capture myself performing the actions so this is me running from my bedroom across my Landing into this office behind me so I did this for each of the swap guys so for each take I did this about four or five times per take so I actually run in and then for this one I dropped down onto a knee because some of the characters have gone to the knee and

then some of them stop in this standing firing position so for each take I did this about four or five times per take the same in if we go to take two you can see I've got the same thing here just running around the corner and then drop into a knee and then in this third take just for coverage just to make sure I've got everything that I needed I did another one into position but then I did a lot of just straight runs to stop in the different positions again and down onto the knees just so that

I got coverage depending on what I needed from for the actual take so the other thing to point out here is I am actually holding something although I'm not capturing a prop I am actually holding a tripod so the tripod just gives me a bit of weight to carry so it looks like I'm actually holding something and also it keeps your hands together especially when you're doing things like two hands moving as one here where they go into this kneeling position or where you go into the standing position if

you try and mine this although you think they're both moving together they're actually going to be slightly different timings especially when you turn and things like that they'll drop out of position and then obviously you have to go and fix that in animation so it's better to catch something even if you're not capturing the prop and it's not the actual prop like this I'm just holding something that keeps my hand synced in about the right position this is just going to save you time when you c

ome to do the animation the last thing to note with this obviously is because I'm using the xn's mvn system I can run from one room across my land and into another room it's really good in these kind of situations where you're doing something where to set an optical system up in this kind of environment where you've got multiple rooms and you're running in different things you could do it it has been done but it is quite tricky to set up um but with the NBN system you can just set up the base st

ation in one room which was in the office where he's standing at the end and then I can run across a landing into another bedroom and start from there and it'll capture me across all that distance without having to worry about occlusion or not being able to see anything so it does really work well in situations like this where it may not have a big motion capture Studio or a space you can use if you're like I was at home or you're working at home and you need to run between different rooms it's

really good for those kind of situations or on set if you have to move between different sets or move around and you can't always put a motion capture system in you can actually use the NVM system for capturing these types of tricky environments where line of sight isn't always an easy thing to set up for so the next step after I'd captured all that was to bring it in and lay out this story block the same as we did in a previous tutorial so this I've done in exactly the same way so I've brought

in all my characters down this side I've brought in all the clips I've animated the cameras and created the shot track which is what gives us a camera switching so this is just to lay everybody out so you can see here here's the run that I've used and then all the different runs into the positions that sort of shoot firing positions that we've got and then obviously the extra bits that are captured for the guard coming around the corner and then the start of the shootout and once I was happy wit

h this layout and how everything was working I baked everything down onto the control rigs ready to start editing which is what we're going to look at next so the best thing we're going to do is just hide this Lobby and then we can come into our perspective View I'm going to select any guard and just line these up so the first thing we need to do is bring in the weapons and put it in the hands of these guards so at the moment obviously when I've just been laying the scene out I've not really bot

hered what these hands look like or whether they're working or anything like that it's just to get them in into the shots so what we need to do now is merge in all the props all the gun props for all the different characters so we can come up into file merge we can grab our M16 and then in here we want to make sure we discard all animation discard all settings and we don't want any animation I'm going to merge in one of the M16s so we can just share everything if we just come over to this weapon

so in here we're just looking uh scene browser we can see we've got an M16 with the handle object and then the actual mesh so we've got a scene root and then the handle that we can use to move our gun around and align that's where we're going to keep all the animation just in case ever decide to update these this M16 mesh so now we need to align this gun with one of our swap guys so if we just spin around we come to this first swap guy what we can do is we can grab our handle now I'm just going

to use alt left click drag or just drag it onto the hand we could use the hand we could use the wrist it doesn't really matter just somewhere around this point and we can do a line translation rotation now unless these have been set up you're working in a game sometimes or some props that actually set these up correctly so when you do this alignment it will actually align with a handle with a weapon joint these aren't set up that way so we're going to have to rotate these into position so we're

just going to hit R to rotate and then F5 to switch it to local and then we're going to position this in this hand so as you can see here this the hands are in the wrong position now this is usually because like with a lot of motion capture unless your actor and your character exactly the same size the hands aren't going to be in the same position you're going to get little offsets which is what's happened here I'm not the same size as this swap guy he's actually taller than I am it just means

when it transfers this data the hands are slightly off so we're going to need to fix those so what we can do first is we're going to position this gun in the right get it somewhere like we're sort of happy with and then we can constrain this up and then refine the positions to get these hands so that they're matching so he's holding a gun so what we'll do first is we'll create a simple parent child constraint so if we come down here into assets constraints if we just grab a parent child constrai

nt we're going to drag that onto our handle I'm going to constrain that object and then we're just going to get that to follow the wrist so we can alt drag the rest into the source object and then we can snap so now when we grab this wrist so now when we grab this wrist and move it around you can see the gun's going to follow so we'll create an animation layer and we'll position this hand roughly where we think we want it to be for now just to get a rough position then once we're happy with that

what we can do is we can position this the second hand and then when once we're happy with the rough position of that I mean look at this hand it's a little bit off so what we can do is we can turn off our constraint grab our wrist again and then we're just going to rotate this over so something that's probably going to help us with this positioning is to do the just to roughly pose the fingers for now so if we just come in just to get these looking like they're holding the handle of the weapon

so now we've got our hand posed it should make it a bit easier to pose this gun and then once we're happy with that we can come back to our parent child constraint we can just snap that again so that's aligned so now we can have another look at this front hand and we'll probably do the same with that and just put the hands into some kind of pose so if we just bend these fingers then once we've got our hands into position that we're happy with we're gonna constrain this wrist to the gun so if we

come back down into our asset browser grab our parent trial constraint we can grab that onto the ik effector and we're going to constrain that object and then we can grab our handle and we're going to use that as a source and if we snap that again to maintain this offset so now what will happen is at a moment if I move this gun around you can see this the other the hand doesn't move with it that's because I've not turned the ik on so what I need to do is turn on the ik and the FK and now when I

move this hand the other one stays constrained so it just means now if I want to come in here I can refine the position of this hand a little the handles down the correct position aligned with this gun and if I want to adjust this position maybe bring this elbow out a little bit more and drop the shoulder if I want to bring this elbow out you can see if I start moving this the hand starts moving around so I'm going to do is I'm going to pin this effector with using W and E so that just pins the

translation and rotation so now I can move this elbow out also bring the shoulder a little bit further around I'm not quite happy with this wrist position so we might bring that wrist over just because your wrist tends to bend that way in line with your arm rather than that way that looks broken so then if we come back down to our parent child constraint I'm just going to turn that off for now and then just reposition this hand and then we can adjust the position of those fingers again and then

once we're happy with this position again we can race Snapper constraints and then what we'll do now is I'm just going to put a keyframe on these wrists on a new layer and then I'm also going to keyframe these fingers just so now if I move off this spot and come back I've always got a place I can return to if I need to reset this constraint or anything like that I've got a position where I know he's holding the gun in the correct position that I'm happy with so I could reset the constraint if s

omething moves or something breaks later on so once we're happy with this position if I come into His Hands what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a pose so we're going to come down here into post controls I'm just going to select his hands for now and we're going to create a pose so this is going to give us this sort of two-handed weapon pose that we want so now with all these other swap guys I can just come in here select air fingers and then we can come into the pose that we've just create

d we double click on that and put the hands into the into roughly the right position so you can set a keyframe come over to this guy we can do the same on this guy okay that and then just repeat that for all the other characters in the scene so what this means now is even though obviously not all these although the sort of guys are carrying a weapon at the moment if we bring in another M16 so this time when we grab our handle bring it in and align that translation and rotation with the hands now

when we come to rotate this into position because we've got this hand shape it gives it a much better idea how we can align this weapon with the hand so now what we do is we continue bringing in each of the weapons aligning it with the hands and setting up all the hands until we've got them all in and then you end up with something like this so you can see now each one of them's got a gun we've roughly positioned it in what we think is going to be the right position for now and then if we just

switch back to our camera view if we scrub through now you can see each one of them is holding a weapon it's not exactly perfect for now you can see some of these alignments a little bit off you can see they've all got a gun where they should have and it's roughly in the right position in their hand positions are roughly okay apart from these two so with these what we can do is we can bring the weapons in in exactly the same way but for the poses similar to what we did with the swap guys we're g

oing to use a hand pose now we don't have a hand pose in this what we have got is the previous scene that we worked on where we've got our hands in the right position so what we're going to do is we're going to open that scene so if you remember this was the scene that we were working on before and if we go to the end of this we can see we've already got these hand poses so we can do here is if we come into our Nigel character and go to his hands we can come down here to the poses and then we ca

n create a post which is going to give us this hand pose of him holding the two guns here so you can see here we've got our Nigel hand pose so then we can come to Tracy and she's got a bad carrying hand and a relaxed hand so again we can select a hands and just create that so now we've got our Tracy and Nigel poses so you can rename these into something a little bit more descriptive so let's just call this gun pose for now and we'll change traces to relaxed back pose so now what we want to do is

we want to save these two out and just extract these two bits out of the motion Builder file so to do that we can't actually select them in here and save them but what we can do is we can come over here into the Navigator and we can come down to poses and if we just shift d to make sure we've got nothing selected or edit deselect then we're going to come down here into poses and then we're going to select the two poses that we've just created and then we can do file and we're going to do save s

election and then in here we can just give them a name so that we know what they are and then in our same options window we can specify what we actually wanted to save so we don't want any takes we don't want any animation we don't want any of the settings elements and we can start by discarding everything else in the scene and then if we come down here to poses that's all we actually want out of this scene so in motionbuilder you can actually tell it what bits you want to save from a scene whic

h is really handy for stuff like this where if you're doing poses so if you imagine if you're working on a game and you want to save a load of different poses out or import them back in you can use this same method so you can tell it that you don't want any elements in the scene apart from poses so now we're going to save this file but we're only going to be saving the pose in the scene so if we save that so now if we open that file so we can see even if we've got everything selected in here if

we open that file if we come down into here you can see the scene's completely empty if we go into the schematic view you can see there's nothing in here but if we come down to our poses we can see we've got our Nigel gun pose and Tracy relaxed back pose and that's also over here still in our post controls so now we can go back into our file rather than having to pose these hands we can start with hands there'll be no sort of work so it can come into our Nigel rig am I just going to select his f

ingers on both sides and then we can come down here into poses and animation layer one and then what we want to do is file most of those poses we've just saved then just to make sure just to be doubly sure we're gonna discard all elements and we're just going to come down to posers and select that and then we can hit merge and then when we come to our pose window down here we've got our Nigel and Tracy poses so then we can come back into the fingers just make sure we've got Nigel's fingers selec

ted select this side press Ctrl go to the other side with control press just select both sets of fingers double click that and you can see now we've got our gun post fingers so we can set a keyframe there and we can come into Tracy and then again if we just come into this handle we select one finger we can switch to the other hand press Ctrl to select both fingers make sure you've got both fingers selected and we can just hit apply pose and that gives us the backhand and the relaxed hand from be

fore and then we can keyframe that so what this means now is when we bring our guns in and the bag and start aligning them we've already got a pose that we know worked in another scene and it's just going to help again with the line in those weapons rather than trying to do it in the sort of flat paddle hands that we've you'd have normally so now we've got the weapons in the hands of all our characters now what we need to do is come back in and start refining some of these poses because as you c

an see some of these don't look like they're going to hit anything but the floor when they actually come in and get into their positions so the first one we're gonna do is we can come into here and we're going to work on this first guy that comes in here so if we Control HR control rigs let me just select this one it's going to set the right control rig up here in the character controls and then if we hide our lobby Ctrl Q into our perspective camera just have to focus in on him so what we can w

hat we're going to do is we're going to look at fixing this gun where he brings it up so that when we see it then in the camera here he's actually a line and looking like he's going to shoot more than just the floor so if we look at where he starts to bring his gun up so much like when I did in their punch what you're looking for here is the sort of main key poses so what we want is the one where he brings it up and then he stops which is somewhere around here so if we select both arms and just

make a mark there so we're just going to key that for now just so that we know where it is and if we look where he brings his gun down so he starts to move the gun up somewhere around here let's say four six two so we can make another key here if we just hit F to zoom in so now we can just work on getting a slightly nicer pose with this so we're going to start with the right hand because the left hand's constraint to the gun so hopefully if we can get something that's working for the right hand

the left hand should be in a good position to start with so what I'm going to do is here is just hit W and E so that's just going to pin this hand it's going to pin the rotation and the translation of his wrist so now when I started just in his arm I can bring his elbow out without affecting his hand if I don't have that turned on when I move his elbow it changes the position of his hand which is not really what we want what we want to do is get this into something like a pose and then just make

tweets on the rest of his body without it breaking the position of his hands so you can bring this um and we could look at moving the shoulder a little bit and see if we can get her hand into a slightly better position obviously because his other hands his left hand's constrained to the gun what you want to make sure is as you're positioning this you're getting a pose not just for this right hand but also for this left hand that looks correct as you can see at the moment not too bubbles if you

go too far with some of these poses his arms are going to look broken he's either gonna end up stretching in his hands coming away or his wrists going to bend back into this really sort of cramped broken wrist kind of position so although you're working on the right hand at the moment you need to be mindful that it's also affecting this left hand pose because you can see here it's it's gone quite broken now so you always need to be measuring up especially when you've got a constraint setup like

this that what you're doing to one side isn't breaking the other so when we've got a pose that we're happy with here we can select both wrists I'm going to key that and then we're going to come to our weapon up position this aiming position here and start fixing that in exactly the same way so again you're looking to get this right hand in position but also paying attention to this left hand and also to our shot camera so that it actually looks like he's aiming as well from this camera because s

ometimes what you can find with the camera angle is what can look right when you're in the perspective you like this looking at your character when you actually look at it in the camera it may not look like he's aiming where you want to be so sometimes you have to sort of play these animations to the camera so that they look correct from there because that's ultimately the in the end where you're going to see it from so we're just going to adjust this in exactly the same way so again keeping tha

t wrist pinned so that we can adjust this elbow get this elbow out also checking that we've not broken this wrist on this side for the hand holding the gun so that's all still in line and making sure that we've got this butt of the gun nicely tucked into his shoulder here if we look at that in our camera view a little bit over rotated bring that back around and if you're happy with that we can key that and then if we just Ctrl 2 to bring up two views you can check that with our reference so if w

e wanted to to match it completely we could bring this elbow up a little bit more key that if we just check that in our perspective View you can see now our guard comes in he brings the gun up and aims it at our characters although if you look in the actual scene he's not aiming at it if we put Nigel and Tracy back in you can see he's not aiming any he's not actually aiming at them but if we're looking at camera view where's he got here you can see is it looks like he's aiming towards them but w

e might do have to do is just at the end here obviously his hand goes down so he can just come in here and fix this pose so that it still looks like he's aiming ahead so the last thing we just need to check is because we're using a parent child constraint on this front hand here on his left hand we just need to make sure because it stays fixed the whole time through although it works when he's actually running in in this position so when he's carrying the gun it looks fine but when he actually b

rings the weapon up to an aim you can see it starts breaking his wrist so this is focusing on that you can see the shape here is getting it's getting quite Twisted it doesn't look too bad but would expect a slightly different position here and this is something I see quite regular is people are set up one constraint and then they'll sort of fix it so it looks like his hand is now glued to this thing so what we need to do is fix this so what we actually want is say when he brings his gun up here

we just come down into constraints if we just turn this off for the moment what we probably want is something a little bit more like this so you can see now we've got something that matches a little bit close to our video reference obviously we need two different positions I guess if we control Q into our perspective View and then look at our two hands so we know that the pose here is correct and where we want it for holding a gun when he's running and then when he actually aims we want this pos

e and then we need to obviously fix the hand with the gun on the other bit so what we can do is we can actually animate this constraint so if we look at the constraint in the properties we can see there's a offset here that actually gets stored so when you hit snap it changes this offset so if we look at on this Frame oh we've got the keys actually this Frame where we've got the key where we've got the hands in the correct position for carrying the weapon if we hit if we show the properties for

that weapon we hit let's now you can see there that value and if we take this off if we come to our frame where he aims a gun which is this one so we don't have the constraint to end on and then if we go back into the properties if we hit snap now you'll see those values change and then obviously if we move that back you can see that then breaks the hand in this position but it's correct for this position so what we can do is we can animate these values so if we go back to our first pose if we j

ust lock the properties for this so that we can see these all the time so now if we hit snap you can see these values change then what we're going to do is we're going to keyframe these and we're going to turn our parent child constraint off and then we're just going to come to this second position which we know is correct for where his hand is and we're going to hit snap and again you can see these values change so we're going to keyframe those so now if we keep an eye on those values you can s

ee as he moves those values change and now when we look at the hand in this position the rest is correct and when we look at the hand in our aim position it's also correct and then as he Moves In the gun's going to stay in the hand but with this correct sort of aiming position rather than the carrying position so if we come back into our camera view we can see the gun it lifts the gun up his grip changes and the gun moves inside his hand so it doesn't look fixed so animation apparent child const

raint like this helps you avoid that sort of glued onto look that you sometimes get where especially with like the second hand this front hand here if you don't animate the constraint it's going to look like it's glued to this gun and that it doesn't move and also as we saw you can end up with these really broken poses that just look unnatural and they're going to spoil the look of your animation so the last thing we're going to have a look at is this first shot here if we look in our compare th

is to our video what we've got here is if you watch closely you can see whoever's holding the camera is standing still and they start to run here and then run forward and there's a bit of little bit of camera Shake so what I'm going to try and do is recreate that camera shape that's on here but rather than animating it we're going to use a constraint so if we focus in on this section here and just play that back you can just see that there's sort of a little bit of Shake on the camera as whoever

's holding it's running along so what we're going to do is we're gonna control Q into perspective come back here if we had our lobby for now so what we want to do is borrow the actual up and down motion from one of these characters and use that to create the up and down motion on our camera so if we look at these in the video it looks like he's whoever's holding the camera standing still and then they start to run here and then they'll start to pick up speed so if we can find one of our SWAT guy

s that does exactly the same so if we watch this guy at the back here you can see they're standing still and then they start to move forward and then they're running right through to the end of the clip so we're going to use his momentum his up and down motion from his hips and we're going to add that to the camera that we've got in our scene so to do that we're going to come down into assets constraints and for this we're going to use a relation constraint so we can drag that into our scene so

what this gives is like a plug and play build your own constraint so what we want here is to create what they call senders so this is going to be where it gets the information from so we're going to start with the hips from this guy and we're going to alt drag that into there and set that as a sender so that gives us any property on these hips that are animated we've got access to here so we want the translation and then we want our camera one which is this one here and we're going to grab that

in and bring that as a sender because we want the translation in Z and X so the bit that moves it along the floor we're going to take from the original animation and then we're going to take the Translate Y from the camera and then we're also going to drag the same camera in again but this time we're going to set it as a receiver so now we can take the inputs from our hips and a camera and put them into the translation to animate it forwards so what we need to do is convert these translations wh

ich are vectors into numbers so if we come down here there's a converter section in here there's a just drag this out there's a vector to number so we can drag that in so what that does is it takes a vector and converts into x y and z and then we'll need one for this as well so that's just going to take our translation vector and then convert it into translation X Y and Z so then to get that back into our camera we're going to need to convert it the other way so that's going to be a number to Ve

ctor so we can put that over here for now so you can see our camera goes with enough because it's not got any inputs to tell it where its position is going to be so for now we know that we want the Z so we can connect that back up and we want the X we can connect that back up and if we look in our camera view we've got our floor we bring our lobby back in and then we can take the hips the translation of the hips and connect that to our camera hips obviously the problem with that is we can see th

at lines it up so this camera now has the same height or Y value as this swap guys hips so problem with that is obviously it's way too high compared to our camera position that we want so what we can do is we can disconnect that and then what we want to do is subtract a value from this y to lower it back down so if we come down here into numbers we can come down here and there's a subtract so we can drag that in so now we can take our y value put that in here and connect it to our y value again

and then in here we're just going to right click and set value and now we can drag in here to lower our camera so that it's on the floor so now as we start to play that through you can see there's very little up and down at the start but then as they start to run the camera starts to move up and down and here it goes through the floor so what we can do here is just bring this back up so that it's just on the floor and again we can use a right click drag just to move it a little bit smaller so no

w we can see if we play that back we can see there's an up and down on the camera which just gives it a little bit more life there's a little bit more movement in there but if we compare that to our original video file we can see ours has a lot more up and down movement so what we can do to help with that is we can use a multiply so we can drag our multiply in and then we can just move these other two out and then we can take the number from here put it into here and connect it up and then again

we can set a value here so if we set it to one it's going to take these numbers if we right click in this box you can do show all values so that will show you the values coming out so we can see here the actual y value that we're getting is 19.66 so as it moves along that's going to be the same so now if we want to damp this down so it's not moving up and down as much we could say we only want half of that so you can see now the values coming through are half the values that it's actually getti

ng in so now when he runs along the motion's still there but it's a lot more subtle so if we compare that now to our video footage we can see at the start here there's very little up and down motion and then as the clip progresses as a cameraman fake cameraman that we use in here which is a swap Guy starts increasing speed and starts running you can see the camera moves up and down a little bit more so you're getting the same sort of action that you would expect to get if you actually had a came

raman holding this running along with these SWAT guys thank you so much for watching I hope you found this video useful and don't forget to subscribe to the next video we'll be moving into this probably experience jacket at some point shouldn't I