axyz women in heels and mocap

[MikeGentile]

does anyone know to adjust the biped when a woman is wearing heels?

i have bought some rigged females who are wearing heels. when i load the mocap her feet push into the ground.

thanks in advance

mg

[Scott Schroeder]

I'm guessing you are getting this and want this?

 

 

It's a pretty simple fix, at least it's one way to do it. First off, you need to make sure you are in figure mode for the biped. Then, select all of the affected skin modifiers. If it is a typical model, then this is the feet, shoes, and pants. In the advanced parameters of the skin modifier, turn off "Always Deform". You'll probably have to do this 3 times for each part's skin modifier.

 

Once you've done that, rotate the main foot bone back to the standing flat foot and fix the toe bones. Since you are messing with the initial bone position, you'll need to then re-tweak all of the skin envelopes. If you don't, your guy (or gal) will look like they dropped a 50 ton block on their foot. Get the envelopes back to a general position on the foot and you should be pretty much good to go.

 

Go back to all of the skin modifiers and enable "Always Deform". Exit out of Figure Mode in the biped, apply your mocap and you should see the foot be relatively flat. Re-tweak as necessary. You might want to write down your rotations in case you need to re-open things if you've tweaked them too far. This method is quite finikcy and can break your rig quickly.

 

It won't give you perfect heel strikes on a walk cycle, but you'll be close enough as long as you don't zoom into the feet. Due to how they rig the high heels and that most mo-cap is done flat footed, you'll never get a perfect clean result.

 

You can also clear the animation keys for the foot bones (in the Keyframing Tools of the biped, Clear Selected Keys) and custom add the foot walk cycle animations.

 

If the character is standing still and moving, it's a much easier fix. In the Keyframing Tools of the biped, select the main foot bone and use the "Clear Selected Keys" button to delete the animation keys. Then, rotate the foot back to normal high heel position. Flip back in the Keyframing Tools, select "Anchor Left/Right Leg" to prevent the foot from sliding around during the mocap playback.

 

The mega-easiest fix is to hide the feet with foreground elements and selective camera angles. You know how in 99% of all CG when someone walks it's mostly shown from the knees up? Well, apply that and just hide the error to begin with.

 

[Devin Johnston]

I've been having this problem for years, thank you Scott for posting this answer.

 

I must say that I find it bad business for AXYZ Design to be selling these models and MOCAP files without telling people they don't work properly with all their models. I own hundreds of these things and I've asked them how to fix this several times and never got an answer, they don't even return my emails.

[Scott Schroeder]

Yeah, I've never fully understood why they sell high heeled models for animation. High heels, let alone the stripper heels that AXYZ models come in, are a real pain the get the mocap right. As an extra headache, unless you have your data done in the same heel as the CG model it still won't be right. If do you capture in 4" heels and give your model 6" heels, you'll still get that rotation problem.

 

To add to my noted solutions, I've also reset the bones back to flat foot and modeled some shoes for the females to wear. I now can just cut the problem off at the source and remove the heels all together if I need them to walk.

[axyzdesign]

I really don't know why you did not follow the user guide pdf distributed within the products.

You don't need to do what Scott wrote in the forum. You just need to create a new layer and rotate feet creating a new keyframe.

That's all.