Slashdot Mirror
Breaking Motion Capture Out of the Studio
Fnord666 writes with a CMU press release. From the article:
"Traditional motion capture techniques use cameras to meticulously record the movements of actors inside studios, enabling those movements to be translated into digital models. But by turning the cameras around — mounting almost two dozen, outward-facing cameras on the actors themselves — scientists at Disney Research Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University have shown that motion capture can occur almost anywhere — in natural environments, over large areas, and outdoors."
I have the xbox kinect and I would think it would be a great tool for this. From what i understand many of our nerds brethren have a disassembled kinect's and retooled and programmed them with all kinds of funcky capabilities.
In Soviet Russia, motion captures you!
This sounds obvious, but when you look at it like many things these day it is a matter of compute power, particularly having enough at a reasonable price to make it practical.
You mean cameras can take pictures almost ANYWHERE?
The article points out that it's slow and inaccurate. The cameras are bulky and would get in the way of the actors. The advantages seem to be outweighed by the limitations.
Mocap is highly overrated anyhow. The best animation I've seen lately was in Rango and although they used actors for reference it was all hand animated. Straight Mocap always looks fake it needs a lot of tweaking to look right. It's an interesting reference but it's no replacement for a talented animator.
Is it possible to get the same result using a series of motion sensors (like the Nintendo Wii uses)? If not, then what is the cheapest/easiest way to capture real-life movement (and apply it to 3D models, for example)?
Interesting approach. I would have loved to have seen the presentation, but also today at SIGGRAPH, Autodesk had a presentation by Kevin Wittkopf and Geoff Richardson showing off using the Kinect in production with Maya. Why bother with a suit and a bunch of cameras when Kinect rigs and only going to be getting better (and waaaayyy cheaper) Autodesk is streaming their presentations from the exhibit hall. I'm not sure if they are going to do that prese again tomorrow or Thursday, though. (please don't everyone check it out at the same time...I'm trying to watch it)
So how long before the inevitable application of "Rule 34" to this?
Let's face it, the porn industry has been a leader in adopting technologies for some time now.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Blender Tomato Branch
http://www.vimeo.com/26420002
Latest build
http://graphicall.org/?keywords=tomato
You can find the devs on #blendercoders @ freenode.
All rites reversed 2010
Sounds like we are mixing two problems and the video shows a problem that seems to me not necessary in solving. I'm no expert or even n00b on the subject but I never really understood why you would need a camera and florescent dots on a person to record motion. Why can't you just have sensors that measure the movement like my phone, and you could do this anywhere. The video recording of dots seems like the old school poor mans way of recording points and thereby recording motion. Now if you want a three dimensional scene to be recorded along with the motion then yes it makes sense to use a camera but I don't see how a three dimensional scene could have been created in the studio anyway by recording dots. Now if we are talking about the matrix like freeze while moving around a three dimensional object isn't that a different problem? From what I recall this is done by recording with several cameras but is motion really involved? Now perhaps both of these problems can be solved now using this new method since you now have a three dimensional reference for the scene but doesn't the data need to be collected separately? I mean if I just stand still and wanted it to be a shot of me standing on a hill while the cameras do that helicopter circle pass shot that is over done what three dimensional model have I recorded for the scene since I have not moved?
...YOU capture Soviet Russia!
You can look at the video here.
The motion-capture of the guy swinging from the monkey-bars looks somewhat realistic until you realize that his hands are swinging around in the rendering when they should be (and are) stationary on the actor.
Should be interesting when the technology matures, though.
With the Scanimate?
The accuracy on this is pretty bad, as you can see from the comparison to the Vicon system, so this has very limited use in production, and it seems like it's trying to solve a non-existent problem. It doesn't get rid of the cumbersome suit from motion capture, so you can't really get capture data while performing in front of a camera, and there are already solutions on the market that allow you to create a motion capture setup outside using regular cameras and get motion capture data without any tracking markers. The only new thing this brings to the table is having a really wide range of capture, as the test with the person walking along the curved path shows, but the practical application for something like that is limited. Attaching cameras and trying to create tracks off of the movement of the background just seems a really backwards way of doing this kind of stuff.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
I can remember they did something similar for Gollum in the Lord of the Rings. For the last scene they filmed for the Return of the King they didn't have the time to capture Andy Serkis after filming so they stuck him in the mocap suit and captured him during the filming of Elija Wood and Sean Astin. This saved a load of time in postproduction, and due to the interaction Andy Serkis had to be there anyway.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.