I've tested out the applications so far and I'm looking to get some advice and some questions answered. First off, I am only using 2 PS3 eye cameras as I don't want to buy more until I know I can get enough from the 2 that I can justify paying for more. I've recorded a few shots but it seems that the calibration I'm trying isn't working as well as I'd like and I'm not sure if I'm just using the wrong technique or whatnot. So, my questions:


1) I have the camera calibration tool that ipisoft released. I'm trying to figure out if this does multiple camera calibration or is only set for single camera calibration, and if it does multi-cam, how well does it work?\

2) My first attempt at pulling animation tracking from the videos I've done seems to get the legs in the right position but the arms go insanely out of place off the t-pose. I can't seem to get the poses to match up off the skeleton and the video. Is that something that I can fix through better calibration, better alignment (I get it as close as possible), or something else?

3) Tracking seems to take an ungodly amount of time. Any way to speed it up? We're talking almost 3 hours to track a 1300 frame animation off a 60fps video. Is that normal?

4) I have my two cameras at different heights and angles. Should I attempt to keep them at the same level or is this not an issue?

5) Does this support different body positions, like kneeling, turning (full 360), laying down, and so on? Are you limited to doing all motions at a forward or "cheating forward" type of setup or can you record full motion, be it with just 2 cameras or up to the full 4 in the 180 degree semicircle?

Thanks for the help!

You should check out the iPi Software Wiki; I think you'll find a lot of your answers there.

Briefly speaking, you can't expect to get much depth information or tracking accuracy from only two cameras; it will work but only if your character isn't walking around or turning very much. For that kind of motion you need at least four cameras, and now iPi supports as many as six, which may be best for very complicated motions. (I'm using four and it works very well.)

As for the calibration tool, this tool is completely unnecessary for PS3 cameras. It's only for cameras where the FOV is an unknown.

Tracking speed is dependent on your graphics card. For best performance, you'll want a Geforce GTX 250 or better. With my old system using an Geforce 9600GS (I think), capture was about 1 frame per 10 seconds, which was unacceptably slow. With my new computer and a GTX 260 card, I'm getting better than 1 frame per second. Users with a GTX 480 have reported tracking 4 or more frames per second. Now that's pretty fast!

G.

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