I know this is an extremely advanced feature and it is not critical for me, but it would be really cool to capture hand poses. Even the ability to "mark" frames so that I could easily set hand poses in my animation software (currently using Poser) would be a bonus.

I haven't done this myself but I believe you can import a Poser compatible rig into iPi Studio with hand bones, target your captured body motion to that. Then, I think you can then bring the iPi Poser file into Poser, and apply your hand animations to it in Poser. I'm not that familiar with Poser, but I think Poser has 'canned' hand animations available if you don't want to animate the hands manually.

If you're asking for iPi Studio to capture live hand and finger motions while capturing the body at the same time, I wouldn't hold my breath for this feature. Even with high end motion capture equipment, this is very difficult to do; most of the time, the hands are captured after the body capture, and then the hand data targeted to the rig's hands.

I agree that would be nice if a future iPi did allow for a separate hand capture pass that could be targeted to hands after the body motion has been targeted. To be honest though, right now, I'm more interested in head tracking (not face capture) and maybe wrist rotations.

G.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

Greenlaw,
That's exactly what I do for now. I capture my motions, then import them into poser. Just imagine doing this for over 4,000 individual signs plus phrases.
I agree that hand motion capture is extremely difficult. I tried a Cyberglove and gave up. At $18,000 it was way too difficult to use.
There is some research in using video to capture the hands, some in Japan, some in the U.S. I contacted one group about using the IPI vids to generate the hand data, but no response yet.
I'm not expecting miracles from IPI, it's just on my wish list.
Head tracking and wrist rotations would be a nice feature, but not sure how they can extract wrist rotations without adding some markers raised off the wrist.

I was surprised that they are able to do shoulder motions now; to me, tracking the clavicle seems even harder than wrist rotations. With the wrist you at least have the end for the sleeve to define the pivot position and the arm and hand for angles. iPii Studio's new shoulder tracking capability gives me a lot of faith that the iPi programmers will figure out the rest of the body.

Best of luck finding a solution for the hands. It sounds like an immense but worthwhile project. :)

G.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

Don't ask me why the hands do not work the same way that everything else does but you can't currently set the hand and then run the tracking. The hand snaps back to 0. I just did a motion capture and what the hands were doing was quite important. So I tracked the whole video on Low Res, then I came back frame by frame and moved the head, sometimes tracking at High Res when the head does not move alot. Then, I had to go back through, after I did jitter removal, and set the hands manually, frame by frame, without Pose Refitting. The end result was that I had more than enough to work with in my bvh editor to make the motion capture look perfect.

So, setting the hands manually is possible, just a heck of alot of work.

I may wrong .. very very occasionally I am (Joke) ..
I don't think hands will ever be possible with a markerless system. Writ rotation and bend .. yes.
What the hell do do you do when an actor half closes a hand or forms a fist?

Kevin

I think it's possible, just not at the same time as the markerless body capture. It would be great if iPi DMC had a separate markerless 'hand tracking' mode that could track a 'hand only' Recorder sessions. The hand mocap could then be appended to 'blank' hands of the body mocap as part of the mocap editing process. (iPi's mocap editing is pretty sparse at the moment, but I'm hoping that it's in their plans to beef it up in the future.)

I know that many highend mocap facilities typically do something like this even if they have a marker based system. With proper planning it's easier and the results can be far more accurate.

FYI, at work we sometimes wind up keyframing hands, even if we have capture data for the hands. This is typically because the cg character may interacting with cg props and environments that are different from what the performer interacted with. Same goes for the head animations; the live performer often isn't looking at exactly where we need the cg character to be looking.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!