EARLY ACCESS BUILD 12 IS AVAILABLE
I’m very pleased to announce that ACS3 Early Access Build 12 is now available to all registered users. You can read the list of improvements included in this release below.
Adds support for retargeting motions from imported skeletons such as Mixamo or other motion capture sources. Retargeting is implemented via special biped rig preset that you have to use as a starting point for rigging your character. This feature is designed to be as easy to use as possible, intialization process is pretty much a single click. Fingers retargeting is supported. Retargeted motion keyframes can be reduced so animation data is less dense and heavy (but watch out for loss in precision, reducing keyframes may alter motions too much). You can animate over retargeted motion using both FK and IK rig controllers.
Enhancements to poses and actions library: copy/paste pose, mirror pose. Saving out and mirroring poses now supports item selections. When some controllers are selected only these controllers will be taken into account when saving or mirroring the pose. Current scope of pose commands is represented by changing icons and button labels. Note that this is still not full implementation of poses and actions library, more features will be added in later builds.
Modules can now expose their properties and commands directly in the rig root item properties panel. This way you do not need to select relevant module to get access to these properties anymore. The example is the Root Motion property of base module - now you can simply select rig root item and you’ll see Root Motion button there. The same goes for car rig - all its properties are exposed directly on the root item now, no need for selecting body module anymore.
A number of changes and fixes were applied to rig assets to both fix issues and make them work with new retargeting workflow.
Fixes added to seamless IK/FK workflow. FK->IK switching would create and leave unnecessary keyframes on IK solver items - this is fixed now.
Fixes deleting multiple modules in one go. Previously only one selected module would be deleted.
Biped arms and legs now have soft IK parameter exposed in their sliders panel so you can adjust the amount of softness for IK solving easily.
Biped arms and legs now have an extra slider to blend between smooth and stepped IK/FK blending. Stepped is default for regular biped rig (works better with seamless IK/FK workflow), smooth is default for retargeting rig.
I gave a quick demo of retargeting workflow during Foundry’s FriYay stream, you can watch it below.
For detailed coverage of retargeting support in ACS3 watch these 6 new manual videos (videos were also added to the Manual page).