New walk cycle (and character, and location)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10aAP52pl5__uMtDxejzol7UguPSD-kNq/view?usp=sharing

This afternoon, the last bits I need to do my own motion-capture arrived. I installed all the software then couldn't be bothered to set up the hardware. As others have pointed out, I don't have the space for it. I will still try, but for now I had a shot at Mixamo.

Mixamo is an Adobe library of mocap animations that are free. It can even auto-rig your models and add the animations. So, I played around with it and found it's tricky to get data from a Mixamo rig onto a blender rig, even by parenting bones to each other, it didn't really work.

In the end, I generated a rigged model of Bergen, exported just the skeleton, rigged the model in blender with the skeleton, then using the same model on mixamo, downloaded the skeleton animations. After a lot of trial and error, I copied locations of each major joint bone from the mixamo rigs, then baked the animation data into an action that could be reused without the mixamo rig hidden and animating.

This was needed, because I need to mix animations. So walking then sitting would use two different skeletons, which would have meant a lot of faff. This way, I have an ActionModel, which I use to extract animation data, and the usable rig that I can just import the saved actions onto.

This video is the initial result with only a few tweaks.

Note: Cos this is just a previs animation, it shows things like lights and has fur hidden. I need to do some work on weight painting the trousers to stop the legs clipping through as well.

Also, some notes on the corridor design. The obvious two are the general shape and all those yellow and black bars. Both of those are important to the actual functional design. The corridor is in a spaceship. It currently has gravity, but the danger of a loss of gravity means a corridor cannot be smooth walls, but it also can't be cluttered with stuff to float around and injure people. A sloped wall to the side gives an area for utilities, wiring, etc, while the piping is more likely to need maintenance so is left exposed. However, you need to also protect them from people floating around. This gives handholds on both the wall and ceilings for moving around safely. This is emphasised by the green light strips in the ceiling, indicating that vital functions in that area are functioning correctly.

At the start, you will also see a striped panel on the right wall. In addition to safety features for loss of gravity, these hatches are scattered along the corridors, are easy to spot and will contain emergency equipment. In regular buildings, this could be fire suppression kit, which this would also hold (fires would be dealt with by systems in the corridor itself, but portable units give redundancy if the proper systems failed), but also portable oxygen kits in case of a loss of atmosphere, expandable kits for roughly sealing hull breaches (strong sheeting and adhesive foam) as well as your standard first aid kits.