Motion capture real time
polycounter lvl 8
Somebody knows which kind of affordable system is able to do mocap, to control a biped in real time?
I've tried one kinect but generally linking the nodes to the bones is hell and movement is not so fluid.
I've tried one kinect but generally linking the nodes to the bones is hell and movement is not so fluid.
Replies
I've used the MOVEN system:
http://www.xsens.com/en/general/mvn
And it works well - but it's nowhere near as cheap as using kinect. You'll have a hard time finding any motion capture that's in the same price range as kinect.
As for low budget kinect I found two and I use one right now...
Brekel Kinect
Its free and realtime but about as good as getting raw realtime feedback from a kinect, which means pretty crappy. As far as I know you can only use one camera which means you must always face the kinect and can't turn to the side. It doesn't track feet well, it doesn't track wrists, shoulders or the head, the results are very jittery and hard to work with. The export/import process isn't quite as quick and friendly as other software, but its free...
iPisoft
Is pretty good, I like it, but you do have to pay for it. You can use a bunch of cameras two is normally good enough,
more will allow you to fill in the "shadow area" behind an actor with actual point cloud data which drives the whole rig-registering system.
This isn't a realtime system but you record video and then process it and smooth it, then export it.
You can also pause it and adjust the rigs pose and then start processing again, this doesn't happen in realtime capture.
It also allows you to use other devices like the much cheaper PS Eye, when you're looking to use a few cameras this starts to make more sense.
You do have to be careful of ones that use MotionBuilder in their export pipeline. Its great software and really comes in handy when cleaning up and re-targeting motion capture, especially if you're not using a motion capture friendly rig. The problem is that its not free so you have to add its cost into your budget also...
Of course if you jump up to more traditional motion capture solutions like opti-track or Xsens, the quality goes through the roof, but so does the price tag. Although the prices are starting to come down as they realize they need to compete with the increasing quality of the lower end solutions.
As far as i remember it's possible to use 2 Kinects for that and it works pretty good. You could try writing to Quantm Berlin the Game Design education there uses the 2 Kinect technology for their mocaps.
(https://berlin.sae.edu/en-gb/course/9740/Game_Art_and_3D_Animation)