DIY Motion Capture Studio for Blender
Grant Wilk writes:
Hey everyone!
Ever wanted to try out motion capture but haven’t had the time, space, or funds to set up a $4,000 motion capture rig? Well, you can, and it’s ridiculously easy, affordable, and space concious.
If you don’t already know me, my name is Grant and I’m the host of a YouTube channel called Remington Graphics where I share a variety of helpful videos related to Blender. Recently I’ve been trying to break out of the traditional Blender tutorial concept and try something new — that’s when I conceived the idea of a cheap home-made motion capture studio. Still interested? Check out the video below to learn how you can make your own motion capture studio for about $85.
Thanks for tuning in, and good luck!
The hard thing here is how can we manage motion capture properly in Blender, or how can we do proper animation retargeting in Blender (taking into accound differences between each character physiology)
But good video! :)
Cheers!
Earlier attempts with a kinect have been very prone to sliding feet. Is that still the same?
I think that is for sure, but for some people that don´t know how to animate and want to test things and such, could be a good resource.
I think, the main problem is how to handle mocap (fixing, for example sliding feet, and retargeting) from inside Blender.
Cheers!
There is some slight sliding now and then, but it’s significantly improved from previous attempts. Improved Kinect hardware combined with Ni Mate’s smoothing keeps it at a minimal state.
when you will make the part 2 of the tutorial,where you add expressions and a more robust armature,like that of manuel bastioni lab or rigify with the head bones ?
“I got the Kinect V2 for only $45” …. “By the way it appears the price of the kinect has skyrocketed since the release of this video and it is now $300”. -.-
I don’t use kinect but prefer inertial in our studio – http://mocap.com.au
I was hoping to see Intel’s RealSense™ since it looks more professional.
I got a second-hand Kinect v2 for £18 and a second-hand adapter cable for £55 here in the UK, so that’s about $95 USD total. The shop I got it from had 17 of them in stock, so 2nd hand supply seems to be higher than demand at the moment, so prices are possibly cheaper than people realise. Possibly because Microsoft recently announced a new Kinect (for Azure) is in the pipeline?
I have already 2 kinect machines. The first and old and the second version. What would u like to do with two kinects ?
Has anyone successfully skinned a retargeted armature to a mesh? I’m really struggling with getting the rotation right, my model is always twisted from the torso upwards. Not even sure it’s possible anymore, because I tried a lot of different things. Inverting the CopyRotation isn’t working either :( Any suggestions? Great tutorial btw :)
Any ideas on how well this setup would work to capture motion for two people at once interacting with each other? For instance, capturing a dance animation?