Hi everyone,

I just figured out a really easy way to extract key frames to create head & wrist rotations tracking from the video footage. I will create a step by step tutorial later, but here's how:

Once your fullbody tracking is complete, save your file & simply set a rotation key on the head & hands at the first and last frame of the video by selecting the bone and just use rotate tool.
Next just begin scrubbing through until the head / wrist is rotating, then set a keyframe before and after the rotation. As you move through you will see there is no interpolation between keys and the head/wrist snaps to the angle you have keyed it at only on that frame. This is fine as once you export it you are left with the required rotation keys. All you need to do then (in any external animation package) is delete the in between keys so you are left with a nice clean curve. It's up to you how accurate you need it and also makes editing it very easy..

The video shows how the head / wrists are tracked in the correct orientation, and it can be argued that although they are manually keyframed, the keyframes were extracted by capturing the motion, and are just local rotations as the position is already tracked...

Hope that helps you all make better mocap :)) I am very happy to have created such an easy solution to overcome the current limitations of the software.. Now I know it works I am definatley going to buy it soon :))

Happy new year & thanks ipisoft for making such a great piece of software... :))

this is the wrist head example, not great animation, just a quick test to see if it worked or not...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVN1NKIf8AA

this is some earlier stuff, with corrected head orientation, no wrist movement.. (except 1 shot in the middle somewhere..:))

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAN5lRW7 ... ata_player

Alex - E.V.P

Inertial mocap specialist / R&D / Holographic systems designer

http://Www.Animazoo.com
http://Www.activ8-3d.com

Hey, that's pretty clever!

I had wondered if there was a practical way to use iPi DMC for manual head tracking. I have characters in our film who move their head in time to music that was played during the capture session but I couldn't figure out how to keyframe the head properly in DMC and gave up. Since then I've been hand keyframing the head animation in my 3D package in sync to the music track, but this is time consuming and of course the motion is not really tracked to the original performance. I'm eager to try your technique tomorrow and see if it speeds up my workflow.

Thanks for sharing.

Greenlaw

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

Hey the good news is it's very fast process and just takes a few keyframes in the right place if all you need is good orientation, if you need more detail you just apply as it seems nessecary, and the curves are very easy to handle afterward :)) very simple and works great :))

Let me know what you think when you tried it :))

I had a go but it doesn't suit Animeeple as there's no way to remove all the data between the keyframes. I'll have to try it with something else sometime. :)

Motionbuilder works great.. :))

yes, once the intermediate data is removed in something like Daz, I could then take it into animeeple and do what I do there again. Not having Motionbuilder :)