Rokoko Smartsuit hub disconnects under body-weight pressure (ground mocap)

Development Character & Animation
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Hi all, I’m using a Rokoko Smartsuit Pro II (Glove-Ready) with 2 Smartgloves to record Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) ground techniques, bringing the mocap into Unreal. A lot of the capture happens with the practitioner lying on the floor, on their back.

Issue: when there’s body-weight pressure directly on the hub (worn in a back pocket), the connection to Rokoko Studio sometimes drops completely and the character freezes until I reboot the hub.

I already fixed a separate, more general WiFi interference problem (dedicated 5GHz channel, router settings) which helped a lot with overall jitter/packet loss, but this specific pressure-triggered drop still happens.

My best guess (not confirmed) is that body weight is holding the hub’s power button long enough to trigger Hotspot mode (5s hold) or a hard reset (10s+ hold), per Rokoko’s own docs about those thresholds. But it could also be something else: antenna shielding against the body/floor, a loose cable connector, firmware behavior under WiFi obstruction, etc.

Has anyone here done ground-contact or contact-sport motion capture (wrestling, martial arts, stunts) with an IMU suit like this and run into something similar? Any fix you found — padding the hub, repositioning it, a firmware setting, a different mounting harness?

Posting here since I couldn’t find this specific issue discussed anywhere else. Happy to share clip data if useful. Thanks!

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Turn the suit around. The hub position isn’t fixed you can put it anywhere including making up your own Gi with the properly placed positions.

That said, the mocap you get from it is absolute garbage, so unless it’s a pet project you probably shouldn’t bother.

A mocap studio where they use cameras costs less to rent per session than a suit ever did and provides ready to go fbx, as a comparison.

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I would reiterate @MostHost_LA advice, the puck doens’t need to be in that back pocket, so finding a way to get it on the abdomen is probably your best bet if you want to continue using the suit, but trying to use a markerless camera system is likely a better bet, although I could see that being tricky with people rolling on the ground and occluding cameras. We have a lot of success with the metahuman markerless plugin from epic and way better results than we expected with non-ideal videos, so I would see if you can make that work before spending more money. Perception Neuron and Xsense are your higher quality IMU solutions, so selling rokoko and looking into a rental may be your best bet if you think you really need to use IMUs. I know perception nueron doesn’t have a hub that people have to wear, all of the imu’s sync wirelessly to a hub via radio signal.