Hi All,
I’m working with animo_mocap motion packs and wanted to know if anyone has any used them? I find them to be pretty good. Here’s what I found so far.
Really good mocap, good balance of everything… has a good amount of gritty, street driven stuff… great for gangster movies and drama for what I was interested in…
Pricing is decent. You get relatively more than your standard pack, some of them have up to like 96 motions.
Motions compliment one another
Some motions are named while some are in abcde variations.
Some of the motions were hard for me to find elsewhere. Was happy to see it in RL.
Drawbacks?
No animated thumbnails - not a big deal (kinda an RL luxury anyway)
Has same still thumbnail for all motions in pack. Would be ok if you could see the file name, but
The filenames are extremely long, making you toggle from thumbnail view to details view to see what the motion name is.
You also have to reset pivot for most of the motion’s I’ve seen so far.
Overall, great pack. Just takes a little longer to use for me. Anyone else used these products?
Yes, I have many of these motion packs (the prime exceptions being some locomotion packs that have moves I don’t need in iClone (such as moving in 8 directions at 45 degree intervals), because I can always change the direction of the motion without such increments in the iClone TL).
In general, my experience with these packs is pretty much the same as yours. The value on some of the packs (especially the Daily Activities Mega Packs) is pretty insane, with about 3 cents/DA points per motion. Yes, these motions are not as curated as the regular packs and some need more editing/refining than the more polished ones in some of the other packs by this creator, but overall it’s pretty impressive stuff for the money.
While this creator apparently came from game-asset marketplaces, many of the packs have motions that IMO probably work better for “cinematic” use or cut scenes than regular game action, which I—as a non-gamer—do appreciate a lot.
Yes, animated thumbnails would be nice, but they are probaby too time-consuming to create in view of the fact that we are talking about several thousand motions which would likely reflect in a higher price.
Yes, that is a bit of a problem in terms of usability. With the sheer number of motions, you can also easily spend a lot of time with the demo videos to find the one that best fits your needs.
As far as I can tell, this creator has already converted their entire back catalog of motion packs for use in iClone which is why they were able to put out so many packs within a short period of time; now I suppose new motions will have to be created (i.e. motion captured) first, for new packs to drop, so I would expect the introduction of new content to slow down considerably.
Honestly, I’m a little torn about it. I found him on renderhub and asked him to bring them over to RL back in january this year. I really wanted to support the creator and I was excited when I saw those packs — I even offered to help improve things like thumbnails and organization to make it easier for everyone. I train creatives through dc programs and it would of been a quick project and great story honestly to get free work done. (At least rename the files so we don’t have to deviate completely away just to find an unnamed mystery motion. I don’t have many packs in my content that isn’t at least labeled… Once I really got into using them, it slowed everything down for me.
It’s not the worst thing — I know curiosity drives a lot of folks to buy these packs too. But looking back, I wish there was more of a standard for how these get organized before they hit the marketplace. I probably spent around $300–$500 altogether, so I’d love to see that time and money go further. I probably would of purchased more but I have to stay away from those packs. I’m working on long form and everyone around me was extremely frustrated after a few hours trying to work with these packs. The amount of cursing was unbearable lol … They are just too hard to use when you can’t even see a filename. There’s so much other work to do in iclone you know.
Also with how they were ported over, there’s numerous issues with pivots and motion root that also has to be corrected. Just too much. It takes me 4 times as longer for a 15 second clip using these packs than with others. One of the students described it as " a super nice sports car with a tractor engine". another said “why they let these packs into the store”. I can’t explain but I can just give feedback. I’ve refrained from commenting publicly in hopes that the creator can improve for RL marketplace… If he doesn’t, it’s his choice. We just have to steer clear you know.
Ah well… lesson learned. No hard feelings — I just hope future packs get a little extra love before release. We live and we learn I guess. For now, I’ve hidden all vendor products that slow my projects down so my staff can stay focused. I end up tinkering and sitll trying to see the good and bad in these packs in my off time. Sad but it is what it is.
Well, I’m just a hobbyist, so I have time to tinker and no deadline or customer demands to meet.
Yes, there are issues with these packs. But that is not unexpected for animations that are ported. I have similar issues (pivot/motion root) with motions that I import from other sources (for example, exported from UE). As far as I’m concerned, it is either get what you can get and make the best of it, or do your own motion capturing (handkeying from scratch is not an alternative for me).
While it is true that “official” iClone motions (especially those made or commissioned by RL themselves) are more polished and integrate more easily, they also list for a good deal more (i.e. higher cost per motion); yes, there are all kinds of discounts, but still.
I get that when working in a team or professionally, other considerations may play a bigger role than the mere purchase price. That said, I don’t mind spending a little extra time, and there is really nobody but me to hear my swearing if there is going to be any. 
While that would be desirable, I think it might also prevent creators who have specialized on other software than iClone from going to the length of adapting their content unless they can be reasonably sure to recoup their investment in time and money for doing so.
I also find it interesting that many of these motion packs have already been RL certified despite these shortcomings. But perhaps that is for RL to have fodder to train AccuPose on…
Importing external motions is a completely different world IMO. Importing external motions vs marketplace are two different ballgames.
With external motions, it’s a not guarateed to work (but has gotten better). I’m not contacting them about their motions if it doesn’t work. They don’t make promises to work in your tool. It’s an fbx most times. It wasn’t designed for RL eco.
Animation packs that we buy from the marketplace, I would assume has a QA or reviewer, or even a blueprint so that a standard was used. Until now, I thought that RL had a strict standard but now packs are just not being labeled by othe vendors either. Just worried this will continue to be the thing.
I enjoy using the tool but I would rather pay a premium for things that I use.
Another idea that would eliminate all of this would be to allow us to rename the files. Atm that is also not possible, but you can make a collection. People that have 6 pages of purchased content can’t use a “collection” to organize things.
Well, so far, it has been my impression that the Marketplace is pretty much a free-for-all in terms of quality levels (which is probably why there are some assets available for purchase that I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole—and I’m not talking about these motion packs) as long as the uploaded content does not violate any laws/RL rules.
AFAIK a certain quality standard only has to be met for assets to be listed in the Content Store.