i am an entry level 3d character animator (key framing) and not high level professional animator.. recently i faced an issue where i got a job to 3D Animator Mocap Cleanup Artists in maya. usually i use to work on those rigs which use to have controllers but here i see only skeleton which seems to be in fk if i am not wrong. we were able to do it in right way.. can you pls help us in this issue..?
For real i never understood about this last stage of workflow called "Polish animation" in graph editor. I see a lot of people saying "no one escapes from the Graph Editor, you gotta polish your curves, etc etc," but none of them actually teached how you do that...Sometimes i see weird curves in my graph editor, but it works. When i'm changed the curves, to something that seens to be flowing better visually, its actually a really mess. I get all weird movement and rotations. I don't know how to polish, because sometimes the weird graph editor for me seens to work really well.... (hand key animation only. I never used mocap)
Hopefully it helps, I used to see a lot of issues with my students cleaning up their animation data. It can happen when keying sometimes as well, especially when your trying to be quick!
I suppose that it depends on the situation. I generally bake out the entire skeleton and deal with the keys in the graph editor. As for the joints, I exported the data from Vicon Blade that comes with that skeletal setup. The data will apply just fine to a similar bipedal skeletal setup.