Using Kinect 2 to Animate

Development Character & Animation
1

As the title says :). Has this been used alot? I’m just starting to work on animation and I have a kinect 2 here, just wondering if anyones had any good results from using kinect to animate their rigs.

Heres a random video of it in UE4

Credit to Elaushen Denfard

2

Hi there MrWilson13,

There’s a few challenges when trying to get good (enough) animation from Kinects:

  • occlusion : what to do with limbs when they go out of camera sight (notice how many demos are people mostly staying in an A-pose facing the camera)
  • field of view : you’ve got about 2 square meters to work in, past that you go off camera (try capturing a sprint in that)
  • software costs : you’ll need some software to process the kinect recordings, ipiSoft seems to be good (and Brekel) neither of which are (any where near) free

Are you aware you can do some stuff just with web cams? For instance:

3

Thanks for the reply ioFlow,

Would you say using a webcam would have better results? What about using Kinect and a Webcam directly together? But looking at how smooth those examples are they seem alot better!

4

Sometimes you just have to try stuff :slight_smile:

5

Haha that is true! So i have, I have just used iPiSoft with the Kinect 2 and a web camera to record a short animation with my rigged character. Works pretty **** well needs abit of smoothing and need to get it into UE still. If anyones interested I’ll youtube the results :slight_smile:

Thanks again ioFlow :slight_smile: