That live demonstration was amazing. I remember Jim Henson demonstrating a rig where they could control a CG character the way they would a puppet. The image on screen was super low-poly, like "Money For Nothing" low, which they could capture the motion with, then re-assign it to the real character for rendering.
Good to have you back, man! Awesome video and looking forward to seeing what you will be doing with the suit. Re: parenting, keep it up. It gets easier little by little as they grow up. :)
This suit is very uncomfortable for me, it's hot and tight, and often imprecise, often requiring recalibration and adjustment of captured data, which frequently drifts. Finally, the official recommendation was to use a small black box to truly stabilize the "hand" data. I wrote to the official support, and they replied that it's inherently imprecise, questioning what I expected for the price I paid. However, from the official advertisement, it indeed told me that it could be directly used for animation, it seems I misunderstood.
No mocap is super perfect for animation in my experience. I found it extremely stable for the most part. The drift is definitely an issue for longer takes though. About a minute of animation leads to a pretty decent amount of offset. Personally I’d prefer fixing drift vs fixing jank haha. Regular optical mocap suits (the ones with dots) are much more comfy though they get hot AF real fast
I remember doing Mo cap crowd scenes for films a while back and the space and gear alone was immense! This has come a long way so if you can get away with doing this work at home then that's going to be a great leap for independent artists. Very impressive!. Do you colab with other artists for work or are you doing everything in house?
Currently working from home as a Rigger for a small game company! Before that I was freelancing and teaching. I haven’t worked in an office since 2020! So the more tools I can take advantage of at home the better!
@@Dikko Agreed. I imagine with tools like this & Blender etc.. There will be more opportunity to be able to do just that. I'm focusing on Grease pencil as a 2D animator right now and love how even with the package at present I can in theory still put together a complete project at home alone if need be.
A game studio I was doing voices for asked me if I do motion capture. I told them that while I haven't done motion capture per se, I have studied physical theatre, masked theatre, and character acting, and have also been 3-D scanned. Haven't heard back from them yet, though. A friend of mine is going to be doing some motion capture for a main character in a new Ubisoft game later this year. Really glad he got the job, because I was the one who recommended him to the person holding the local auditions! Even got to run lines with him during his audition (hoping Ubisoft would notice me too, of course 😉).
Speaking of having a ton of key frames any tips for the simplify curves operator, every time I try to use it, it affects the whole animation and not just the visible curves in the graph editor.
If the simplify curves operator is breaking your animation it’s probably because having a keyframe on every frame is probably hiding a bunch of gimble lock across the timeline. This is largely unavoidable with mocap. The more effient way I like to work is to only clean up sections of the animation that I deem need the most work. That way if issues arise, it’s much more manageable. Another way is to animate fixes on a new action nla strip. This is similar to using animation layers in Maya (albeit less robust!)
@@Dikko Thanks for the reply but no, it's not the gimbal locks that is the problem is that the operator is simplifying all curves even the ones that are not visible, what I suspect is that is has to do with me using the "A" key to select all visible curves instead of box select the curve I want to simplify specifically, I swear I did it once and the operator only affected the one curve.
Something to keep in mind when doing motion capture for various characters: change your physiology for each character, or else they will all move the same way, have the same gestures, appear to be the same weight and age... Motion capture relies on physical acting, and character acting skills. If you're only doing one character and it just moves like you, it's fine, but if you have 2 different characters and they all move the same speed, have the same mannerisms, it's going to look weird.
For mocap I spent virtually no time on clean up, it’s pretty damn good to me :). A little time spent on sorting out some of those contracts and I’d be pretty happy :)
The money you save in not paying for Maya means one day you might have money saved for a mocap suit ;). Pretty decent trade off if you ask me. The suit is still definitely priced at those who are working professionally. Worth noting that an optical mocap set up starts at around 15k for a basic set up. Luckily AI mocap is getting better every day and will provide a cheaper alternative to hardware based mocap
@@Dikko Yeah, I'm looking forward to cheaper mocap alternatives. I'm aware how expensive mocap is, its all professionally priced as you said, and I'm not a pro. 🤷♂️ The suit does look very cool for what it does, I just don't have that money. FreeMoCap is fiddly as hell, and nowhere near as easy to use or detailed as this suit looks, but its promising. I hope open-source tools and open-source AI can make mocap accessible in the way Blender makes 3D accessible.
@Dikko well you won't be working professionally for long if you're wasting money on mocap suits in 2024😂it's multiple alternatives and some by the same company 😂absolutely no need to spend thousands on anything nowadays
