Thanks to everyone for the nice comments.
blukazs wrote:
Lightwave! Great! Keep it alive! Thought you also did retargeting in it. How about the new genoma addon? It is capable of handling/retargeting mocap? The hands look very realistic, is it mocaped or keyframed?? Also the body movement is nice and clean! Too Bad that the kinects have such a small work area :/
Yes, we're very happy with LightWave these days. In recent years we've been adding a lot of other programs to our pipeline but for the most part our final CG renders and effects work is being done in LightWave 11.5. LightWave's Bullet dynamics was very recently added but it's fast and incredibly useful already. FiberFX has also come a long way in the last couple of versions. The new Instancer is awesome too. Compared to many other CG programs, LightWave is a good bargain because the render nodes are still free.
As for mocap retargeting, no, still no retargeting in LightWave. FBX has been working flawlessly for motion transfer so we've been using Motion Builder for our retargeting and editing and then transferring the results to our rigs in LightWave using the Merge Only Motion Envelopes command. Of course, iPi Mocap Studio also does retargeting so if you don't need the advanced animation tools in Motion Builder, you can probably go directly from iPi Mocap Studio to LightWave. (I personally haven't tried the iPi-direct-to-LW workflow since 1.0 days but I heard from another user in these forums that he's using this workflow with 2.0.) There's also iKinema Webanimate, which accepts iPi Mocap Studio data for retargeting and editing and outputs to FBX--I haven't tried this either but the motion data is supposed to transfer to rigs in LightWave as seamlessly as the Motion Builder FBX I use.
Hand animation in the above demo was added using iPi Mocap Studio's new PS3 Move support for wrist rotation and the new fingers keyframing system. iPi's fingers system allows you to save poses and blend between them with a click. The system is very basic but it's already proving it's usefulness. The motions you see in the demo took a couple of minutes to add and it was my very first time testing/using it. One compelling reason to use the fingers system in iPi Mocap Studio is that, if you free up your fingers by fixing the controllers to the back of your hand, you can use the video stream as visual reference for the keyframing. We intend to start using this workflow on our next movie after 'Brudders 2.'
LightWave's Genoma rigging system is pretty neat. It's not an 'add-on' as it comes with 11.5 and works fairly seamlessly between Modeler and Layout. There is a built-in preset for a mocap rig, which I played around with it a few weeks ago but since we already have rigged characters for Brudders, I'm not using it yet. I may give Genoma a shot on our next film but it's more likely we'll be using Rebel Hill's new rig. Don't know yet--will cross that bridge when we get to it.
As for the dual Kinect configuration's small capture space, you can actually do a surprising lot within 7 x 7 sq ft. Besides, that's about all the 'free space' space we have in our living room anyway. :)
For the above mocap demo, I was limited more by the room size than device range--if I could move the furniture out of the room, I'd probably gain another 2 square feet at the back and sides.
We also have a PS3 Eye system setup on our fx stage in the garage but it's not much bigger than our 'living room' setup. We stopped using it because it's so much easier to use dual Kinect and we didn't need the extra space. We'll probably take down the PS3 Eye setup in the garage and reserve it for outdoors use when we need to record 'big actions'.
G.
