My first iAnimate workshop, I enrolled to learn more about motion capture; a mysterious tool that I had never been able to understand in college. Brent George’s workshop taught me how to wrangle my mind around the arcane interface of MotionBuilder and use the software to pose characters, retarget motion data onto them, stitch motion capture clips together with root motion, and enhance all of it with a little flourish of the animator. In the final showcase for the workshop, I edited a plain walk cycle to have the character wield an axe with a fidget in their cycle.

I have used what I’ve learned from this workshop in my professional career. Motion capture retargeting has been quite useful in my work in motion graphics and film titles, and the additive/override animation layers of MotionBuilder opened my eyes to a whole workflow of possibilities I’d jump back into for iAnimate Games Workshop 3.

Lisa rig and Axe asset belong to iAnimate.net