Indie Motion Capture Pipeline?

OldSalty

Hey guys, I'm looking for the most effective and affordable solutions to getting motion capture animations into UE4.

I have seen decent quality motion capture available on the UE4 marketplace, which is a great start. But now I'm looking to try and create my own, please post here if you have had any experience with motion capture set ups camera or kinematic and software such as motion builder.

Thanks

kanga

I dont think motionbuilder is the cheapest but it is pretty amazing. There are quite a number of editors out now though. I think there are 2 or 3 new ones. The cheapest solution would be xbox one kinect mocap and iclone. I messed with iclone a bit and its pretty decent software.

I have only used motionbuilder with precleaned files but it has a good name for cleaning and filters for that. If you use motion builder one piece of advice would be to import a skined character rigged with plain bones (no cat, or biped or any kind of rigging) that way the control rig in mb can work unhindered. They say you can import all kinds of systems but I got best results with a plain bone structure, properly named.

I think you will be up and running quicker in iclone but you would have more control in motionbuilder, particularly when it comes to blending mocap with your own animation corrections on separate layers.

littleclaude

Where are you based? we are happy to support Indie studios to use our Motion Capture studio for free, for a few days, can set you up with 3 actor suits and get some students in to help. Might even be able to get some budget for actors if you don't mind sharing the capture data for our students.

University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, north of London, UK

OldSalty

We are in Vancouver, thanks for the offer but we probably won't be able to visit you in the UK.

Aabel

I've used http://ipisoft.com/ a few years ago. I found the playstation eyes to give better results than the kinect, even though it was harder to setup. Capturing at 60fps is worth the extra hassle of of using playstation cameras. The results were better than expected, but not as good as what you get out of a vicon setup. It also doesn't cost nearly as much.

OldSalty

kanga wrote: »

I dont think motionbuilder is the cheapest but it is pretty amazing. There are quite a number of editors out now though. I think there are 2 or 3 new ones. The cheapest solution would be xbox one kinect mocap and iclone. I messed with iclone a bit and its pretty decent software.

I have only used motionbuilder with precleaned files but it has a good name for cleaning and filters for that. If you use motion builder one piece of advice would be to import a skined character rigged with plain bones (no cat, or biped or any kind of rigging) that way the control rig in mb can work unhindered. They say you can import all kinds of systems but I got best results with a plain bone structure, properly named.

I think you will be up and running quicker in iclone but you would have more control in motionbuilder, particularly when it comes to blending mocap with your own animation corrections on separate layers.

Thanks for the info, I'm currently learning and evaluating motion builder. We have a Perception Neuron suit so we are trying to work out how to get high quality motion capture data from that. But also work out what the best workflow for cleanup and bringing it into the game engine, as well as making sure we can have a shared rig for all or most of the characters and any things else that will make the production faster and easier.