Animated Series Uses Kinect For Motion Capture

baxpace writes "Thanks to all of the recent breakthroughs of Kinect hacks that have emerged, a new animated series is now in development that incorporates many open source middleware and wrappers available to us all in order to create an entire series with motion capture software using the Kinect, OpenNI, Brekel, MotionBuilder and Maya."

Comments

Wrong weaponry dynamics?

[snikulin]

The gun is supposedly heavy. The body shields and the helmets are too.
In the video I see dynamics of a Styrofoam toys.
And it's not about this particular video.
Now-days I see wrong dynamics in almost all of multi-million mega-busters too.
In my time [insert a lengthy rant here]

Re:Wrong weaponry dynamics?

[mangu]

Which could be solved by having the actors wear real weights while they're doing the motion capture. Not that they'll do it, of course.

What about having them wear real muscles? In the times when swords and shields were used, everything was hard work for everyone, man, woman, and child.

Before breakfast could be served, the house wife had to knead dough to make bread. The little boy had to go to the well and bring a bucket of water. Meanwhile the husband was milking the cow. Day to day life was an endless iron pumping for everyone.

I have a friend who has an uncle in Spain who makes replicas of medieval battle axes. They weigh up to 30 kilos. Try swinging one of those "naturally" with your 21st century muscles.

Re:Will there be a plot?

[__aazsst3756]

If you read the history of Pixar, their first films were animation for the sake of animation. They found themselves fast forwarding through their own work out of shear boredom. They quickly realized no motion picture will work without a real plot.

Re:Open-source--but Maya?

[LetterRip]

Maya? Not the open-source Blender?

The important part was Motionbuilder. Right now Blender doesn't have the tools for dealing with motion capture to give 'clean' results from mocap data. Thus until such time as our tools for mocap improve Blender won't be a suitable choice. Maya can import easily the files output by Maya.

Significant change in VR content creation needed.

[boorack]

I hope it will spark a significant change in video game / VR content creation. Contemporary technology went great lengths in core engine / content display / etc. but costs of creating interactive 3D content / VR worlds is still prohibitive. That significant cost propably limits innovation: if production of a single title with decent graphics costs XXmm$, there is very little incentive to risk targeting other than usual/well tested audience (mostly teens) ?

I hope to see video game/VR industry equipping with tools lowering their costs to the point where high quality 3D content creation will be accessible / easy to use for small studios / artists, so they will be to use it to convey a wide range of stories just like film makers are doing it. Kinect is a good step in this direction.

Widely available inexpensive and easy to use content creation tools coupled with widely available 3D engines can transform this field into what film making is today (exluding MPAA). Kinect can do magic in this regard !

Re:Animated Series Uses Kinect For Motion Capture

[Neil Boekend]

That's not required. They may simply have seen an opportunity to save money and took it. As long as they don't save on story (haven't got sound at work, so I can't hear whether they did that.) I am cool with that.

Que Cease And Desist...

[cyclomedia]

I'm wondering how long before they are sued because at least one of their techniques is patented, seems like the sort of thing that would be teeming with IP.

Re:Game Animations?

[chenjeru]

Yes, but Kinect mocap data is very low quality in comparison to what most studios use for professional production. Also, the skeleton tracking doesn't include rotations of the head, feet or hands. On top of this, it doesn't track props, fingers or faces so it is quite limited. If you watched the video you hear the narrator talking about the Kinect getting them 70% there with lots of tweaking (he specifically mentioned adding head animation). The great advantage with Kinect, of course, is cost.

For high end work, equipment from Vicon or Motion Analysis is the way to go. I use a 24 camera Vicon T160 system daily at Motek Entertainment, which is also where Brekel works. He's developed the plugin for which allows the Kinect to stream skeleton data directly into Motionbuilder.