Motion Capturing

Hi!

Don´t code the movment.. use a animation program like Lightwave/3DStudio then find a good graphican to make the animations. A realy good program for this kind of animation is charactor studio and it works with lw/3ds =)In all of these programs there are sample data

(This is just something I was thinking of a while ago for cheap motion capture, don''t know how practical it is or whether it would work though)

With webcams being as cheap as they are what if you bought two webcams, covered yourself in ping pong balls and ran around a bit. If you positioned the cameras like so (top down view): C = camera, P = person

P ----- C
/
/
/
C

You could record 2 videos simultaneously one for your x-y coords and one for your y-z coords, then as long as your surroundings are very dark you could write a program to find where the high RGB colours (the ping pong balls) are and how much they moved each frame. If you had the two planes of coordinates it would probably be fairly easy to transform these to fully 3D coordinates. Its probably a little too extravagent for one person to do but It would produce realistic animation.

-- Kazan - Fire Mountain Games --

quote:

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Original post by Kazan

With webcams being as cheap as they are what if you bought two webcams, covered yourself in ping pong balls and ran around a bit. If you positioned the cameras like so (top down view): C = camera, P = person

P ----- C
/
/
/
C

 

You could record 2 videos simultaneously one for your x-y coords and one for your y-z coords, then as long as your surroundings are very dark you could write a program to find where the high RGB colours (the ping pong balls) are and how much they moved each frame. If you had the two planes of coordinates it would probably be fairly easy to transform these to fully 3D coordinates. Its probably a little too extravagent for one person to do but It would produce realistic animation.

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Hey,

thats not a bad idea, heh, but Im not sure about how easy is it to write the program that will convert the white blurred (right word?) image to move-speed data. And also, shouldnt the side camera follow the person (and then add the speed to the animation)? Cause as it gets farther you will have to do the pytaghorean (sp?) distance to find out how much the guy moved on his direction, and thats a bit hard after you recorded as you dont have the measures, only (maybe) the angle the camera moved from its starting point.

Ack, I got a bit confused, but ya, thats a good idea, if you manage to make the program to convert that image to readable data.

Cya,
-RoTTer

Well I wrote a Lightwave5.6 player to use for this...I´m pretty proud of it =) it playbacks LW5.6 scenes with almost every thing...bones/lights allmosty all features but no inverse kinematics BUT who cares that part Charactor studio fix =)

Well.. I have tryed to save some objects linked to bipped in 3ds file format, but didn''t realize, how to play them. Actually I don''t want to write a player - I need to playback that motion in my game, any ideas how? D3D x file format is very limited and it looks like animation isn''t suported in Intermediate Mode. How did you guys solve this problem?

Yeh, good idea - the pingpong balls!
I''m taking this under serious considerations. It will in any case be a fun afternoon - running around the balls on your head!
Have got no pingpong balls or camera''s yet, but when and if we''ll be able to reach the stage of perfect implementation of the data - will be doing some running around, playing like little children kicking each other and shooting with water pistols like some GI-joe fanatics. (probably need some booze first. Lots of it! ...what a game this will be?!)

Hmm, sounds like an undertaking. May I suggest adding an overlayed wireframe to show a ''skelaton'' of what the computer thinks the person''s posture is. This will help illustrate any problems early on.

Hmm we do not have problems with skeletons, we have problems animating them - how to make them lifelike? BTW, does anyone understand the problem of this discussion?

It tried some more "sin/cos" animation for a skeleton, and it looks great!
Maybe not perfect, but I don''t want a "screen-size-zoomin" on my characters.

It''s simple, I don''t need money for any animation studio. I don''t need to buy 3DStudio, although I would like to...does anyone know if there''s a cheaper possiblity (legal!) like a student copy for 3DS orso?

I''m satisfied with this, for the moment!

Another question: I can understand motion capture for people figures. How do the professionals do this for dinosaurs for example? Do they start with a man and deform it to a dinosaur? How about fish, dogs, birds or even more complex models? - Is motion capturing an answer here?

("Can''t imagine a bird with pingpong balls flying around...")

I believe they use what is called puppets for non-bipeds. These are just small robot-like devices that you move a little bit, then the positions of the joints are recorded as keyframes. You keep doing this until you have your animation of your bird or whatever it is that you are animating. Here is an example of a "puppet: the monkey .

Since I posted the first message I''ve been looking around the internet to see if anyone else has used webcams for motion capture, but I don''t think so (intel has some cool webcam games though which use a similar principle).

-- Kazan - Fire Mountain Games --

Don''t get me wrong but: using robots, record their movement, and use it for computer animations...seems stupid!

These robots probably have simple mechanical movement, and can be easily calculated using a computer to start with!

Computer calculated movement is much easier, and can even take it a level higher by easily adding a sin/cos in the calculation!

Am I forgetting something here?...
Why do they use this?...there must be some reason?...

Its more intuitive to move around a leg in real life then to type in some complex mathimatical function, especially when you take into account that most animators are artists, not programmers.

Ok, let''s take a look at the solutions we have:
1. sin/cos and calculations... maybe that will do for robots, because their movements are strict. But my characters should move smoothly and I don''t think I can spend hours trying different formulas. And some more: I will create many characters and they should have their personal moving abilities. How the hell should I make animation fast and accurate for each of it?!..
2.Cameras.. what a nonsense - where the hell should I get them?! And if I had, I should be build some kinds of puppets... I am not trying to build a movie, you know... It''s just a simple set of data storing motion information of the hand, leg or whatever part of the body it is...
3. 3D Studio (character studio). It ain''t cheep, I know, I''m also a student, but I have it and it doesn''t make a solution. How?! Those bippeds walk, run and jump realy lifelike but they are there, and not in my program... Has anyone exported these movements to any readable format?
Only few people took part in this discussion... Why? Nobody else has tryed to make moving characters? Are you programming only static objects? Where are the solutions for this?!

There are millions of Quake MD2 files available for free that have running walking fighting etc frames in them.
If this is the kind of stuff you are looking for when creating a demo then write a loader for these and animate them.

Once you can do that then you can get one of the free editors and manipulate the character to look like what you want.



MCSE, MCSD, Sun Certified Java Programmer
Pimp Daddy ;)

Pimp Daddy : Quake MD2 files...hmmmm...don''t know them (I probably should?).

Can you explain some more?
- Where do I find these files?
- Where can I find more info on the Quake MD2 file format?
- Where can I find the FREE editors? Sounds great, but are they of any use for your own game?

Thanks,
Pump Pippy...eh no.

(ps: I must admit I haven''t searched for them myself yet - I''m a little short on time at the moment - so help very much respected!)

Here is how you can probably get a free version of 3DStudioMax or another similar program that is just as good. Download the program called CuteMX at http://www.cuteftp.com/products/cutemx

this is a free program that lets you download programs off other people''s computers who are running CuteMX. Under CuteMX go to the chatroom "Requests". Ask about 3DStudioMax there. If no one knows then you can use the search ability of CuteMX to search for it. Make sure you change the file extension to "*". If you see a man in the chatrooms by the name of Catman, ask him about his FTP site.....because I know he has PaintShopPro5 or something like that.

You want to look at the kinematics or inverse kinematic features of your 3D package. In max they use bones, In truespace I think it was joints. In max you draw the bones then you link each bone to a piece of geometry. Now everything should be moving together but you have to adjust tension and locks at the elbows,etc. When this is correct you should be able to pull the hand or foot and the rest of the joints in the middle will naturally move(pretty hard to get perfect). Now if you export you should be good if your importer supports IK. Not you can just move the hand and not have to worry about a lot of stuff. I haven''t actually tried to bring IK stuff in yet but this is what I plan to do. Hopefully the bones are a seperate object you can play with so if your mesh is one object like with charachter studio then you can designate what to move. But as a start I''d see if you can get basic IK in and work from there.

There is a program that does Q2, HL, UT, and Gen3d models called MILKSHAPE 3dthat is avalible at [URL]http://www.swissquake.ch/chumbalum-soft/index.html[/URL]

it has a 30 day trial and is only $20 to registerIf you could code oneof those 4 model formats into it, Milkshape would be great. Perhaps the Q2 model format is public domain now.

I built the damn thing i just couldnt bring myself to use it on a living organism

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Original post by ncsu121978

Here is how you can probably get a free version of 3DStudioMax or another similar program that is just as good. Download the program called CuteMX at http://www.cuteftp.com/products/cutemx

this is a free program that lets you download programs off other people''s computers who are running CuteMX. Under CuteMX go to the chatroom "Requests". Ask about 3DStudioMax there. If no one knows then you can use the search ability of CuteMX to search for it. Make sure you change the file extension to "*". If you see a man in the chatrooms by the name of Catman, ask him about his FTP site.....because I know he has PaintShopPro5 or something like that.

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Is that legal? Not that I care, but he was interested in a legal method. When you buy a particular program, like Photo Shop or 3D Studio, it is intended to be used on one computer only. You''re not supposed to hand it out to people like that.