Animated Series Uses Kinect For Motion Capture 36
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."
Re:Open-source--but Maya? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Game Animations? (Score:3, Informative)
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.