⬆️Upload a Movement
Uploading your own movements and animation to HEAT for use within our plug-ins.
With HEAT you can upload your own movements from a variety of motion capture profiles to be easily imported into your preferred 3D program using HEAT plugins.
SELECTING AND UPLOADING YOUR MOVEMENT FILE
You will now see the HEAT upload portal:
First locate your desired movement file to upload to HEAT. At this time HEAT accepts GLTF, GLB, FBX, and, of course, HEAT files. You can either drag and drop your animation onto the upload portal or click 'Choose File' and select your movement that way.
We have many motion profiles built into HEAT, and a system built to automatically recognize that bone naming convention from your capture program of choice. You can hit the drop-down to select the motion profile of your movement, but we recommend just leaving it on 'Auto-Retarget' and let HEAT do the work for you.
EDITING YOUR MOVEMENT
On the editing page you will now see your movement in the 3D viewport. Here we are able to view the animation and make alterations to optimize it before finalizing the upload to HEAT.
Starting at the top left corner of the page you will see the 'Bone Map'. If you used the auto-retarget option in the upload step you will see the motion profile that HEAT recognized in your bone map. If for some reason it is incorrect you can use the drop down here to select the correct bone map.
Below the Bone Map selection drop down you will find the bone adjustment sliders. These are very helpful in tweaking and perfecting your animations to look good on a new character.
The different sliders are as follows:
Below the bone adjustment sliders you will find the rotation and position adjustment buttons.
These adjustments are as follows:
ROTATION - Here you can rotate your entire model on along the chosen axis by 90 degrees in either direction. This is very helpful as sometimes when retargeting your character will come in flipped or in a position that you don't expect. HEAT attempts to account for this but there are times where certain motion profiles come in incorrectly. These buttons are a quick fix so that you can get your character standing up and facing the direction that you expect.
POSITION - This button quickly recenters the hip bone position directly over the origin of the root bone, in the case that your animation is not coming in centered.
Along the bottom of the page you will see that last set of options, as well as the timeline controller:
TIMELINE - Here you will the timeline of the animation to be uploaded, alone with a play/pause button. The numbers below the timeline in the center are the frames of the animation on the left and the time of the animation on the right.
ADDING MOVEMENT DETAILS AND INFORMATION
In this final page of the upload process you will add all of the relevant information and naming to your animation. Starting from the top you will go through these steps:
MOVEMENT NAME - This is where you give your movement a name. Name your animation something that briefly describes the movement.
DESCRIPTION - Here you enter a longer description of your animation.
MOTION TYPE - Here you select whether your animation is 'Hip', 'Root', or 'In Place'. It is important to note that this drop down does not SET the motion type, this is just a descriptor of which motion type you used when making the animation in your native 3D program.
HIP - This animation type, also called non-root motion animation, is where the hip bone moves the character relative to the root bone. The root bone does not move and instead stays stationary at the center of the scene.
ROOT - This animation type, called root motion, is where the entire root bone moves around the 3D space, rather than remaining centered and the rest of the skeleton moving around it. The benefit of root motion animation is that you can easily turn an animation into an in place animation but locking the root bone making it very versitle. Root motion animation is incredibly helpful in game design and development.
IN PLACE - This animation type is when the animation has no translation on it, so it animates but strictly in place. This is somewhat antiquated now as root motion is becoming the new standard. In place animation is useful in game development situations where you want complete control over the translation of a character with a controller.
TAGS - In this drop down you will choose tags to describe your animation for ease of searching the platform. You can choose as many tags as you like to describe your movement.
Your movement is now privately uploaded to HEAT! Coming soon you will be able to apply to become a creator and have the option to make your animations public and even monetize them. Please click here to submit to our running list of creators. For further information on how to use our plugins to utilize your movements in your favorite 3D programs please follow the links below.
Next we will quickly cover some best practices to optimize your animations for a seamless upload.
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