DIY Mocap
For a recent pitch I noticed some collogues modeling a 3d character and then painstakingly hand animating keyframes. It’s a long process, and in my experience very difficult to get natural feeling motion. I set out to see if there was a better way. For small projects hiring a professional motion capture studio with actors covered in spandex and ping pong balls is not usually in the budget. But using a pair of Kinects and readily available software I found it was actually very feasible and relatively pain free to set up DIY motion capture system.
The process began by importing and rigging the model in Maya using the Human IK system which automated much of the rigging process.
Separately I set up and configured a pair of Kinects in a conference room and using iPiSoft recorded 30 seconds of myself ‘acting’. Processing took quite a while, but I was using a fairly low powered pc laptop. The end result was a motion capture file that I could then target to my character in Motion builder or even in Unity.