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Automatic motion capture with Deepmotion and Blender

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garagefarm.net writes:

In this short video, DJ from GarageFarm.NET Academy shows how he uses a new Deepmotion.com online service to turn a video of himself moving into an animated 3D character. To achieve this all you need is a smartphone with a camera to record yourself (or someone else) in motion and upload the video to 3d animate cloud on deepmotion’s webpage. You can get a free trial of Animate 3D here.

Animate 3D prepares an animated rig based on the video you upload. This is truly automatic motion capture! You can download the animations as fbx or bvh and import it to Blender or other 3d programs like 3dsMax, Maya, or Cinema 4D

In this video DJ also shows the process of binding the rig with animations to a pre-made character from blender cloud (made by Andy Goralczyk). To do that you can use parenting with automatic weights. With only a few clicks you can have a 3d avatar repeating your moves!

Here are a few tips from Deepmotion on how to prepare the video to get best results:

  • Keep the camera still and parallel to the subject
  • Make the whole body visible
  • Shoot the footage in neutral lighting and have contrast between the subject and background
  • The video can be maximum 60 seconds long and up to 50 MB size
  • The character in the video should be the only thing visible and not occluded by any objects
  • Wear possibly tight-fitting clothing (loose clothes that cover key joints might give worse results or errors)

Here we also tell you more about creating animations with Blender and Mixamo.

This makes motion capture available for everyone and incredibly simple. With almost no skills in animation, you can make your 3d characters come to life! No mocap suit is required and you don’t even need any special markers for tracking.

About the Author

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GarageFarm.NET

An affordable, cloud-based, user-friendly render farm with 24/7 real-time support. https://garagefarm.net

2 Comments

  1. Hi try out a free sign on ..
    and upload a video dance file to create a animated fbx file.

    On the screen, it appears to translate quite nicely the actual video dance and the 3D model default dance motion. However when I download the fbx file .. appears the "armature" is very different that can't really "rig" to a 3D model of mine to simulate the dance sequence. So it is really impossible to test out in Blender.
    Note: I tried with other mocap files from Mixamo and ActorCore motion files (fbx) with no problems. But Deepmotion exported fbx file does not seems to work well at all.

    Could the download include Deepmotion's own 3D model to come with the fbx file?

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