I was wonder what would be nice amateur entry level for motion capture hardware and software. I saw that Microsoft’s Kinect is a nice motion sensor for capturing animations inside of 3ds max and other 3rd party software. I was wondering how hard it is to integrate it with such software and how much I will have to pay.
I want nice animations for my project, and was thinking of cheap MoCap. Captured animations would certainly be better than hand made.
I too became interested in cheap mocap solutions for characters. So much so I’ve taken the plunge and gotten two solutions for animation, both of which rely on the tools created by the site iPiSoft
There are some cracking tutorials on the web on how to export your mocap data into various other pieces of software, I believe they’ve streamlined the process a lot from when I was reading up on it. It would seem the biggest little niche it’s attracted the attention of is the SFM community.
I’ve been able to bag two ways of mocapping, one with 8 PS3 Playstation eyes (what are super cheap now!) for £90, and a Kinect2+PCAdapter for £90. Both have advantages and disadvantages. You need quite a bit of space with the PSEye solution but your capture will benefit from it, and the Kinect can work in relatively small spaces and is a lot easier to just set up and go. Not to mention all the other nice little goodies you get with owning a kinect like 3DScanning.
I’ll leave the one or two videos I saw what lead to me reading up to it. We’re currently at a nice crossroads where it’s relatively inexpensive to buy a lot of PSEye cameras as there’s a lot of leftover stock from the previous generation and there aren’t enough sub-communities buying them out yet.
I’ve had some experience with the Perception Neuron suit. It is pretty decent if your environment is free of electromagnetic interference and you do proper calibration. It is quite versatile being a portable system and all.
I have not tried the iPi solutions but I know people who did, and it seems solid. I’d say that if you can set up the space for it, its data will be more reliable than Neuron’s.
I think you’re correct! I actually purchased a Xbox 360 Kinect and adapter from EBGames ($25 Canadian) and using the ipiSoft 30 Day trial.
I was able to get very decent rough animations in a single day, having next to no mocap experience!
So depending on your budget… this is definitely the cheapest way to do it that I’ve found!
Now if you added a second Kinect and had that set p, you’d probably get far superior results!
He was talking about adding multi-kinect support, which is really what you need. The problem with all single-camera/depth cam approaches is they only see one side of the performer, so occlusion is an issue.
The inertial based suits such as perception neuron are great for stand-in-place motion, such as arms or torso movements, but will always give average results when you are walking, as the sensors only calculate rotation in relation to each other, and as such can’t give accurate translation results unless they know the distance from one sensor to the next, such as in a forearm - wrist setup.
Looked into Brekel. Their solution looks pretty much exactly the same as iPiSoft, but much cheaper. Going to play around with it soon. Thanks for posting about it Antithing.