Layered Animation and Story Mode in Motion Builder

With everything motion capture can do for you, it's not 100% perfect. There are things that need to be tweaked after the footage is cleaned up. This is where animation layers in Motion Builder come in handy. They are kind of like animation layers in Maya but they have a few more features, like the ability to create zero keys, which are special keys that preserve the initial motion so you can isolate the motions you want to change, and keep the ones you don't. This is an additive process so there is no penalty for messing up, just delete the layer and make a new one. Below is a clip with a default basketball shot provided to us on the left, and the right one is my edits with animation layers to enhance the motion.

This next clip is the entire Motion Builder pipeline from characterizing the motion to editing the clips using story mode, and using animation layers. The ball follows along using a parent constraint that has a keyed weight to swap it from one guy to another.