Compatibility and Overall Performance Questions For Motion Capture and Animation

Development Character & Animation
1

Hi there, I am somewhat new to Unreal Engine 4, having recently purchased the monthly subscription, but am not new to game engines as a whole. I’ve used a few others for a few years now and am pretty familiar with them. However I’ve never used animation software or anything that has to do with Motion Capture before. I am curious as to which MoCap software is best and best for price. Also which ones are easiest to use with the unreal engine? The ones that I have looked at are iPi Soft, Mixamo, Brekel Body Pro, And FastMoCap. They all look sufficient and iPi claims to work well with the unreal engine but none of the other companies that I have looked into claim the same. I am curious if any of the companies other than iPi soft are compatible with unreal engine mostly because they are all cheaper. This is a home project but still needs the most accuracy I can obtain. Any feedback or reviews on any of these products is appreciated in general as well.

2

In your typical scenario, mocap solution isn’t much dependent on the engine where you plan it to use because the general and most typical workflow is the following:

  • you make your mocap, possibly filter out the data inside the mocap software
  • then you move the data to 3dsmax, Maya or similar, you further modify your animations to exactly fit your needs (raw mocap is rarely like that)
  • after that you export the animation to fbx (in case of UE) same as you would with hand made animation which means that at this step the fact that your animation has origin in mocap is irrelevant from the point of view of the game engine

You could theoretically go for process that skips max/maya but I’m not sure it’s the way to go. In your case it may be necessary if you don’t have much experience with animation and 3d software, but that depends on how much you are willing to learn about animation and maya/max.
I think iPi Soft with one or two kinect sensors will work out the best for you (one is easier to manage because in the case of two you have to do calibration). It works decently and has pretty good in app filtering and cleanup features. Depending on your situation you may want to wait till it works with kinect 2 which should provide much better results with iPi.