Prototype, Test
At this point I've already learned how to set up the Xsens suit, the next part was to connect it to a MetaHuman. What I thought would be quite a simple task took days of troubleshooting the exact same thing with little succes.
In order to set up a MetaHuman to work with the stream of an MVN Animate software I had to do multiple steps.
I followed this article which shows you step by step how to set up the connection between MVN Animate and Unreal Engine, specifically for a MetaHuman, but it also works for the regular mannequins of Unreal.
During step 3.2.3 Create T-Pose I encountered my first obstacle.
A t-pose is a really simple and easy pose. However, within Unreal, t-posing the MetaHuman became a challenge, the t-pose needs to be accurately posed to match the MVN Puppet that gets used in the MVN Animate Software, you need to zero out the joints, which means changing the values of the bones global rotation to zero. However, changing the values of the bones didn't work well, the bones wouldn't change the way I'd expect them to. I looked into different tutorials to create this t-pose thinking I was missing something important.
I asked for support from a youtuber called FeedingWolves, who makes many tutorials on motion capture and MetaHuman.
Turns out, there is a bug with Unreal Engine 5.2, I tried what she told me and that seemed to work, it wasn't the cleanest t-pose as I had to manually move some bones but it worked.
After importing the t-pose and remapping the t-pose skeleton to the metahuman skeleton I could continue with the next step.
This took an entire week of trial and error.
At this point I had the suit set up, paired up with the manus gloves and the LiveLinkFace working.
Here is what we ended up with. In here there is some weird stretching with the bones making the character quite lanky.
After some more tweaking and making sure the MetaHuman had the correct body and proportions. We got the final working demo:
This demo showcases the pipeline of working with Live motion capture, as you can see it works quite well and works better when there are less connections interferring the connection between the suit and the MVN Animate Software.
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