I live in a very small house so using ipi is impossible in my home. I have tried the software outdoors and come to the collusion that it will not work unless your willing to work at night. The problem is that you can not get a good calibration with sunlight and what one would find in the background. Any objects that are white or near white will through off the calibration process. Like houses, campers and cars. Also movement of trees will cause problems a long with any wind that is strong enough to move the cameras slightly.

In a controlled space it is possible to get some captures. I have 4 PlayStation cameras wire tied to 4 boom mic stands. Very cheap set up. The only problem with it is the cameras can be tilted so I hold them with electrical tape along with the plastic wire ties. Cameras should level with the floor. Look at the top across the mic and it should be parallel to the floor. Also look at the actor in full screen view, double chick on the camera image. Make sure the the actor is vertical when standing.

Next click and drag the cameras to a sequence order, I lost quite some time trying to get the cameras in order by changing the USB inputs.

Set up the camera in no more than a half circle and each camera should be set just above the actors head with a 5 to 10 degree tilt downwards.

Try to remove any white or bright colors in the background. They will show up when in calibration mode they are as almost as bright as the calibration light.

Also one wall in the background or a corner with two walls are helpful to set the ground plane when moving the cameras to set them for the scene.

Make sure that your in each shot of the calibration and the light does not leave and go outside the frame of any camera. Open and look at the movie file and just watch it. Redo if necessary.

Use the calibration instructions and set the ground markers. (don't forget or you will need to redo the calibration over.)

Once your done calibrating, do one test shot of the actor in the T position and their arms coming to their side. Use about 5 frames in the T and the rest should be a quick movement to the actors sides. Render using the fast render. If the capture ends up moving out of the T and the arms are twisting then you will need to redo the calibration.

This program dose work, BUT: you will have do some cleanup. Some can be done while the program is running. The captures do not get the head turning. You can pause the capture and move the head manually. I would stop about every ten frames to move it. ( the arrow buttons on the keyboard jog through the menus not the time line PLEASE FIX), also if the feet cross you can pause and manually fix it with the same method as the head.

To export to Poser I have taken a one frame mocap and imported it to ipi then renamed the bones of ipi to match the Poser character.

Dale

Welcome aboard!

Some tips: Don't bother animating the head in iPi; as you know, the program doesn't do this yet and your best option is to use another 3D animation program and just animate the head in a motion appropriate to the scene.

One advantage is that you can make your character actually look where you need him to look in the 3D scene, as opposed to where the performer thought he should be looking. Even when we use professional mocap at work, we almost always wind up reanimating the head by hand just for this reason.

You can keyframe the head using FK, but targeting with IK might be better for most actions. Animeeple (which I am using to retarget the iPi body capture data to my character,) has some useful tools for automatically pointing the head at a keyframeable target. Or if you prefer, you can easily set up similar controls in most other 3D apps.

Re: shooting outdoors. Some users are having good luck shooting early in the morning or on overcast days to prevent bright lighting and harsh shadows. For me, the best space to date has been my garage, but it took me over two months just to clean it out. :)

G

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