Who is this article relevant to?
This article is for anyone who wants to learn how to retarget either the live motion or a recorded clip to a Custom Character in Rokoko Studio
Which plans is this article relevant for?
Plus Pro Enterprise
What is Retargeting?
In Studio, you can retarget your Actors to Characters, effectively translating the motion of your Actor, from paired live input or recorded motion to the selected Character. This allows you to see and adjust the live or recorded motion capture on any Character of your choice, and also livestream or export using the data of the retargeted Character.
Important note!
This is a fairly "simple" Retargeting feature, mainly intended to help you visualize your motion capture on other meshes. There's a few options and configurations to tweak the result, but it's not intended to be an advanced Retargeting feature.
How do I retarget to a Character?
First you will need to add a Character to your scene. This can currently only be done by importing a Custom Character.
Once added, you can drag'n'drop the Character to the Actor in the scene outliner, or use the right-click context menu on either the Character or Actor and choose "Retarget to".
Once retargeted, the Character is essentially "paired" to the Actor - similar to how mocap devices are paired to an Actor. If you retarget the same Character to another Actor, it will be "unpaired" from the first Actor, so it's no longer retargeted to that one.
How can I adjust the retargeted Character?
The Retargeting feature in Rokoko Studio is intended to be a fairly simple and easy feature to allow you to preview your mocap animations on a custom Character of your choosing. This means that we do not offer advanced features and options to fully customize the result and output of the retargeting.
We do, however, offer a few options to help adjust the output:
- Mirror Character Mesh: Mirror source animation on the X-axis.
- Adjust shoulders: This allows you to adjust the below shoulder values when enabled:
- Shoulder height: Adjust the height offset of the shoulders of the retargeted Character in relation to the Actor.
- Shoulder shift: Adjust the forward/backward offset of the shoulders of the retargeted Character in relation to the Actor.
- Adjust neck: Allows you to adjust the below neck values when enabled:
- Neck shift: Adjust the forward/backward offset of the neck of the retargeted Character in relation to the Actor.
- Use roll extraction: When enabled, it helps to distribute the roll axis rotation along the limbs (hands and legs) in order to enhance the realism of skinned deformation. Works only for skeletons that contain roll or twist bones.
- Use aim for thumbs: When enabled, use an alternative retargeting solution, based on aim constraints, that helps to improve the retargeting silhouette of thumbs.
How do I export or livestream my retargeted Character?
Retargeted Characters follow our existing visibility state conventions, as in that all Visible objects are exported/livestreamed, and Ghosted or Hidden objects are not. As such, ensure that the Character is set to Visible to have it included in exports or livestreaming.
Note that a retargeted Character and the linked Actor will always have mutually exclusive visibility states, i.e. they cannot both be Visible at the same time.
Be sure to check in the list of livestreaming targets if the target plugin supports streaming custom Characters.
Sample Characters
You can download and use our two sample Characters, Bruno and Roemer, to test out with. They are completely free to use, even for commercial purposes.