Be warned - it aint 'pro' at all.

[Grrinc]

Be warned - this software is far from proffesional. I used it last year and it was a complete nightmare. We ended up buying pro made motion captures and sourcing the rest free from the thousands of libraries that are all over the internet now. We spent no more that £100 and have a massive collection including the 'hero' shots. Easier and cheaper than this software.

[Carm3D]

I heard that it works great but does not track hands or head motions. Those would have to be animated manually. Was there anything else in your experience with it that we should know?

[Grrinc]

Yes. The makers themselves recomend the PS3 camera's for accuracy rather than Kinects. They also recommend using all of them ( 6 I think ). What they dont tell you is that you need loads of room for the spacing of the cameras, ( so it is not a desktop / home solution ) and that you need to distrubite all the camers out on seperate usb's.

Then you have to 'calibrate' them which is a real trial and error pain in the ass. It really is hit or miss. And then you cannot see if your capture was successful until it has been 'solved' off line. It is not realtime. There is far too much setting up and waiting around for results and starting again.

We only actually needed a few specific captures and we bought them from a bespoke service. We also discovered there are literally thousands of free mocap libraries all over the net. Thousands of walk, run, fight, dance and ambience captures - all free of charge and ready to use from the go.

[Narry]

I actually use this program and it works well. They added head tracking months ago, calibration is MUCH easier than it used it be, and it does support limited hand tracking.

PSeye tracking is much more accurate than Kinect, and the tracking is a LOT and I mean A LOT more accurate than a year ago.

[Carm3D]

> and that you need to distrubite all the camers out on seperate usb's

What does this mean? You can not use a USB hub? You need 6 free USB ports on your computer?

[Jerry]

I used the first version to create a prototype Augmented reality demo and found it was worth the price. I haven't touched the 2nd version yet but the first required a little post production work to get up and running in Unity 3. With Unity 4 I am lead to believe you can import the mocap files and have it auto ground the feet and do modifications wihout leaving Unity.

For hand tracking I found it easy to create a couple different hand poses and dynamically switch between them in code.

As for using other animations, it's missing the entire point of home mo-capping, creating unique animations! Sure if you want generic animations for a game go for it, but if you are a designer who cares about all areas of your visual design you can't just phone in stock animation!

[gr1f1th]

I've owned iPi mocap since the beta but never upgraded to 2.0. It's decent software. The developers were really bad about updating customers and left me feeling burned by their upgrade to v2.0. Their software runs post-process so it can be much more accurate than say... Brekel, but you need TONS of free HDD space to record moderate scenes. The post-process only uses one GPU last I heard. Would be nice to see what you get in a side by side raw capture with Brekel's new Pro Body version vs iPi Basic which both only support 1 kinect. For $100 less that iPi Basic you get support for hand, foot and head rotations... and hey if you bundle in his face mocap it's still $46 less. I'd wait and see what iPi does with the next version of kinect. I'm going to guess they'll do what they did with v2.0 and charge you quite a bit to upgrade to use it. (hence why I never upgraded). Hope this helps people out.

Carm3D eredeti hozzászólása:

> and that you need to distrubite all the camers out on seperate usb's

What does this mean? You can not use a USB hub? You need 6 free USB ports on your computer?

You need to buy a usb repeater cable to get any meaningful distance from your rig to create a capture area. No you can not use a usb hub(...maybe a usb 3.0 hub, do they make those yet??) Each camera requires a large amount of banwidth on usb 2.0. If you have some usb 3.0 ports you should be fine putting most of your cameras on those ports and one or two on your basic usb 2.0's.

[Malrick]

It works very well, and I'm only using a single kinect.

[Carm3D]

So that means if my computer does not have 6 USB ports (7 for a mouse) then I can not use this software, correct?

And a USB repeater cable is a simple extension cable with male on one and and female on the other, right?

[vmaslov]

Carm3D eredeti hozzászólása:

So that means if my computer does not have 6 USB ports (7 for a mouse) then I can not use this software, correct?

And a USB repeater cable is a simple extension cable with male on one and and female on the other, right?

It's not about USB ports, but about USB controllers. With PS Eye, it's recommended to have at most 2 cameras per single USB controller. With depth sensors, at most 1 sensor per controller. You can easily add more USB controllers to a desktop PC via PCI/PCIe extention cards.

USB repeater cable is more than simple extension. On female end, it has a small box, that streghtens the signal. Like this one[www.amazon.com]

[vmaslov]

grrinc eredeti hozzászólása:

Yes. The makers themselves recomend the PS3 camera's for accuracy rather than Kinects. They also recommend using all of them ( 6 I think ). What they dont tell you is that you need loads of room for the spacing of the cameras, ( so it is not a desktop / home solution ) and that you need to distrubite all the camers out on seperate usb's.

Then you have to 'calibrate' them which is a real trial and error pain in the ass. It really is hit or miss. And then you cannot see if your capture was successful until it has been 'solved' off line. It is not realtime. There is far too much setting up and waiting around for results and starting again.

All space requirements are listed on our website[ipisoft.com]. For home usage, the dual Kinect configuration is better suited, as it does not require much space. Also, the calibration process is very simple for dual Kinects, it takes about 10 minutes.

The accuracy is about the same comparing 2 Kinects and 4 PS Eyes. However, due to sensor limitations, the capture area is much less than with PS Eyes. And PS Eyes are better at feet and head tracking, as well as for quick motions (60fps vs 30fps).
Calibration for PS Eyes is a bit trickier and longer. However, it is not of a much trouble when got used to it. Of course, it's convenient to have a sort of permanent setup with PS Eyes, fixing them to the walls or ceiling, so you do not need to do calibration very often.

[A Neat Potato]

Carm3D eredeti hozzászólása:

I heard that it works great but does not track hands or head motions. Those would have to be animated manually. Was there anything else in your experience with it that we should know?

Any mocap software using kinect/a camera is not going to capture fingers.

Fingers are far too small for things like the kinect to be able to pick up with any sort of accuracy. In order to get fingers you're going to need to ping pong ball suit up.



Also in response to the actual topic: Any mocap software that advertises to the average consumer who is not a professional artist and wants you to use kinect is NOT going to be professional at all. This is for 16 year old boys to ♥♥♥♥ around with before they move on to real mocap software and a career.

[Syrsly]

Costanza eredeti hozzászólása:

Also in response to the actual topic: Any mocap software that advertises to the average consumer who is not a professional artist and wants you to use kinect is NOT going to be professional at all. This is for 16 year old boys to ♥♥♥♥ around with before they move on to real mocap software and a career.

That leads me to the real argument: is this software worth $200-800?

I would sooner use Blender.

[vmaslov]

Tap eredeti hozzászólása:

That leads me to the real argument: is this software worth $200-800?

Why should not you just try (for free), if you have at least one Kinect? And compare to the results you can get from the solutions based on KinectSDK skeletal tracking, like Brekel.
When trying, feel free to ask any questions here, or direct to our tech support email[ipisoft.com].

[76561198068097307]

grrinc eredeti hozzászólása:

We ended up buying pro made motion captures and sourcing the rest free from the thousands of libraries that are all over the internet now. We spent no more that £100 and have a massive collection including the 'hero' shots. Easier and cheaper than this software.

I am glad to hear that pre-recorded animations work so well for you.

By the way, can we have a look at demo or trailer of your game? Just curious.

[Grrinc]

mini eredeti hozzászólása:

I am glad to hear that pre-recorded animations work so well for you.

By the way, can we have a look at demo or trailer of your game? Just curious.

It is not a game. It is a short movie and currently stuck in a development hole due to college work commitments and other curve balls that life throws at one. When the sun starts shining in the UK again, we will carry on were we left off. Thank you for your interest too.