Hi! I'm very excited about the Multiple Persons Tracking feature.
I had even delayed my pipeline in order to wait for its release.
I have three questions:
-Should we expect any major delay?
-Is there any alternative way of doing a interactive sword fight?
I had tried doing single sections and trying to match later, but is never quite good, and demands a lot of tweaking for at best an acceptable result. No matter how we rehearsed the choreography is... one sword always comes through an arm or doesn't even make contact...
-I case of doing the sword fight using the multiple person tracking, the ps3 move is recommended, right? Is it necessary to use 2 bluetooh adapters?

Best Regards

Hopefully somebody from iPi will be ready with answers soon but in the meantime I can answer a couple of things:

You only need a single Bluetooth adapter--I believe a single adapter can handle as many as 4 PS Move devices.

PS3 Move is preferred over Wii Motion Plus for accuracy. If the computer is far from the capture space like mine is, I also recommend running an extra repeater cable from the computer to bring the bluetooth adapter closer to the performers. This should provide a stronger wireless signal between the adapter and devices.

Even with the availability of two-person capture, you will probably want to use an external 3D animation program to edit the motions if there is to be accurate physical contact of props. The timing of the performances should be very accurate with simultaneous capture but I can imagine how the position of the swords and actor arms/hands may need some tweaking for precise points of contact.

Hope this helps.

G.

_________________
Greenlaw
Artist/Partner - Little Green Dog | My Demo Reels (2013,) (2015,) (2017,) and (2019)

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

I have already been capturing multiple people in a scene for a while now using PSEyes.
I don't have the files for this scene finished yet but the performance can be found here,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS9VVGAP_Us

and a very VERY early clean up shot can be found here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sixYgU2RDhs

Oli

I see you're a DmC fan. Here's something you might like: we created this theatrical cinematic trailer that ran in front of the Resident Evil movie last fall:

DmC Cinematic Trailer

My part on this production was all the hair for the characters, some FX work and a lot of compositing.

Enjoy! :)

G.

_________________
Greenlaw
Artist/Partner - Little Green Dog | My Demo Reels (2013,) (2015,) (2017,) and (2019)

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

That is awesome Greenlaw! Just another thing you have done that I will probably end up nagging you about :D

Would be nice to have a reply from Ipi here, because I to have delayed my pipeline in order to use the multiple persons tracking option. Nearly a couple of months have passed since the initial predicted date.

I completely understand that it takes time, and I'm not nagging (well, not too much)...but is there light on the horizon for this upgrade? If so, can we have some small hint as to what the predicted month of release will be?

...pretty please?





Paul

Thanks for your, as usual, great answer Greenlaw.

I still have some doubts if the psmove will make a huge difference in a sword fight (hnece the characters won't rotate their hands that much). But I'll probably buy them just in case...

ManyMotion, thanks for the reply. Very nice videos, but it is not quite what I'm concern about. Even though, there are multiple characters in the scene, but they do not interact (touch) each other.

Greenlaw, I know this will be completely off topic, but how did you achieve such realistic hair results? I'm struggling to make it look realistic in my tests.
I created the hair using Zbrush's fibermesh, but when I transfer the splines to maya and load them in the maya hair it doesn't look half as good.

Same thing here, Carder. Maybe they don't want to answer this one just yet... vmaslov, who is always helping us out in the forums, is activly responding threads but skipped this one. Let's wait.

This is just my opinion but I'm amazed by how much life the wrist motion can add to the mocap. This has been especially true for our current project because the characters are playing various musical instruments.


If you're talking specifically about DmC, this was mostly brute force modeling using splines and rail cloning in LightWave Modeler. I also used Lightwave's Strand Modeler and Modo's hair styling tools. The actual fiber rendering was done using FiberFX, LW's native fur/hair system. I started learning ZBrush FiberMesh towards the end of that production but I wasn't able to use it on DmC because I simply ran out of time.

After DmC wrapped last August, I made the effort to get pretty good with ZBrush FiberMesh and I really like it now! FiberMesh is so much easier and more interactive than the methods I've been using for the past decade. Quite literally, it could have saved me many days, possibly weeks of work on DmC and other past jobs involving hair and fur.

Today I'm using ZBrush FiberMesh and LightWave 11.5 FiberFX for 'Brudders 2' and it's looking really cute. There's a production log I started over at the LightWave forums that talks about it:

'Brudders 2' Production Log

I don't have the cat renders up there yet but I'll post some turntables soon.

I was thinking of starting an iPi Mocap Studio version of the production log here in these forums but what I'll probably do is post all the info at my own website, including info on how iPi Mocap Studio 2.0 is being used on this project. I'll post an announcement soon.

Anyway, if you want to get good at FiberMesh quickly, there are a some great learning resources online.

The one I found most useful was Digital Tutors, which has a fantastic course called Create Long Hair with FiberMesh--it's not free but the information is very practical and excellent.

If you're interested in fur for creatures, there's a great free tutorial here:

Create Fur with FiberMesh

How the results of FiberMesh work for final rendering depends on your rendering application. With LightWave, for example, I simply export the guides as an .lwo, bind them to my character, and then apply FiberFX. Sorry, I'm not very knowledgeable about rendering hair and fur effects in Maya. I know my way around Maya for animation but for hair and fur rendering I'm only familiar with FiberFX and Sasquatch for LightWave right now.

Hope this is helps anyway.

G.

_________________
Greenlaw
Artist/Partner - Little Green Dog | My Demo Reels (2013,) (2015,) (2017,) and (2019)

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

ManyMotion: How are you capturing 2 people now?
Like to hear your process.
I too am on hold for numerous projects waiting on 2 people capture in v2.
Reason I purchased it originally.

Hey guys

Well after I finished my string of videos on clothing I hypothesized that having 2 actors in somewhat conflicting clothing would work. So for example my actors have red and blue gloves on. If they do infact need to high 5 or shake hands it is easier for Ipi to register blue from red than to have to try and figure out which hand is which (due to the colour clash of the skin). If you apply this theory to most of the body parts it makes the process possible. This was recorded with 4 PSEyes and I can say that there is some clean up needed where Ipi cannot find a good enough location for like an elbow or something. Tracking backwards and refitting was a very important as sometimes it helped to form a generic pose for the problem areas.

I have no doubt that 6 PSEyes would handle this work around better but I don't think my license permits me to use 6 :(

Sorry if that was a little incoherent, its been a very long day. I'd be happy to ask any questions if you have any.

Oli