topic Re: Full Body MOCAP in MotionBuilder Forum

Full Body MOCAP

thecycle — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 21:21:18 GMT

Hi all,

I'm working on a CGI project and wonder if there's is a not very expensive solution for creating mocap with Motionbuilder. I have heard that Motionbuilder is able to sync facial and body streamss in order to get the entire animation at once. My idea is to user actors on scene and record all (facial and body) at once. It seems you can acomplish this by getting a Kinect or ps eye for markless tracking (at least 2 or 4 for acceptable quality). what do you think? Is it also a good idea to buy a suit and buy these markers separately to do the mocap with a goPro, for instance?

http://optitrack.com/products/motion-capture-markers/

Any ideas on this, bear in mind I want to afford both facial and body at same time?

Many thanks for the help

Regards,

Leo

Re: Full Body MOCAP

thecycle — Wed, 21 Feb 2018 18:18:58 GMT

Any help, please?

Re: Full Body MOCAP

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 13:46:11 GMT

Hi Leonardo,

First you should consider the budget you might have for your project, as this will dictate what solution you can afford.

If your budget is low, then you might have no choice but to try something like iPi soft, though from personal experience the results are poor in comparison to the results from optical marker solutions. Even the all in one suits produce results that I consider poor for the cost of the suit but that is my personal experience.

I think you are best off looking in to dedicated studio's that can provide the service for you. If you want to know more, drop me a private message and we can discuss further.

Joe.

Re: Full Body MOCAP

thecycle — Fri, 23 Feb 2018 13:13:41 GMT

Hi, thanks! I've sent you a private

Regards,

Re: Full Body MOCAP

thecycle — Mon, 05 Mar 2018 19:41:12 GMT

Any help from anybody, please? It can't be that difficult for people like you

Re: Full Body MOCAP

Anonymous — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 04:37:10 GMT

Hi,

I think the problem is that their is a lot of information to take in account.

What is the budget, how many day of shoots, what is the quality that you expect.

You are talking about the Kinect and PS eye... these camera give a very low quality data with no facial (that I am aware of... maybe the Kinect2 if it's compatible with MB) you will spend a lot of time in cleaning

Also even with a good system, their is no "plug and play" solution to have both facial and body motion. Autodesk have many body solver (MB solver and HIK 2013, 2015, 2017) but they do not solve the face, which you have to develop your own in house tool to deal with. (I might be wrong, if so don't hesitate to jump in)

Cheers

Re: Full Body MOCAP

thecycle — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 18:38:59 GMT

Hi,

Well the budget is about 3000 euros at most.

I mentioned the ps eye because someone in forum said he used it and had acceptable results with it, but the truth is that I had thought either in Kinect 2, which I think is not compatible with MB, and a GoPro. Is GoPro a good solution for facial? When you talk about cleanig, I guess you refer to work on making the animations more accurate, right? Sorry for the noob question.

And regarding the body and facial "plug and play", I remember reading that MB had the possiblity to manage both streams at once, and that's the reason I choosed it 🙂

Many thanks for replying

PS: I will accept a normal quality, not searching for PRO animatiions. My main target is to tell the story of my novel, even if the quality is not that good.

Regards,

Leo

Re: Full Body MOCAP

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Mar 2018 18:50:26 GMT

That's a hard budget cap you have there. The simultaneous recordings you want to do tend to get more expensive, not less.

Facewaretech might have something in your price range for facial mocap and they do provide a plugin for MotionBuilder. You can use it with a GoPro like you asked. But if you want to record a live performance, the license will probably cost you more than you have. A solution might be to record the video in the session, but analyze and retarget (2 products from faceware that don't cost as much as the live plugin) the animation later on and merge it with the fullbody mocap.

I think purchasing markers won't do you any good, if you don't have hardware and software that can track and analyze the data. MotionBuilder itself won't do that for you. You would need the marker data as C3D files or a plugin that can stream the data into motionbuilder.

I haven't used markerless motion capture yet.

Re: Full Body MOCAP

thecycle — Sat, 24 Mar 2018 09:51:29 GMT

Hi, Vaquero. The thing is that this is a personal project and don't expect much quality in the CAPs. So for me, that budget is painly expensive enough

Thanks all for your advices!