Hello All,

My first post :) Being a very amateur hobbyist who has been learning how to make games in Unity, I've been expanding my knowledge of how to create 3D Games (currently only made a couple 2d Games in Unity). So far, I've been able to get away without investing any real money. However, moving to 3D looks to be a little more involved! I realize that's an understatement.

I've spent the last month or so learning Blender (v2.5X) to create 3D Models and Armatures, and played around with Animations. All this in an effort to create a 3d Pipeline for Unity. At last, I'm starting to feel a little better with Blender (keep in mind, the price is right for my budget... free hehe :). I'm still working on how to make the Blender to Unity Pipeline more consistent, the fbx export/import process seems to have some hiccups still.

I believe I'm now at a point where I can create riggings in Blender, animate them, and get them to work properly in Unity. Of course, the big thing is animating - wow, what an involved process. Therefore, I've been researching a lot about mocap. After reading the internet from beginning to end on this subject, and trying various different approaches to use existing mocaps as a substitute to creating "good" animations in Blender, I've been leaning towards the purchase of a Kinect and iPisoft Express (I've looked at things like Mixamo for Unity, which are very very nice, but expensive per character to rig).

I'm just curious if anyone else has used a similar setup, and what their experiences have been? I've read alot of feedback on this forum, lots of good info. The Mr Bones posts are very informative. Some of the things I'm looking at doing are:
- Creating a custom rig in blender, perhaps for a cartoony figure, which means I won't have normal human proportions (big head, and either shorter or longer limbs). If I import this rig into ipiSoft, will it still be able to apply the motion to this kind of rig? Then export the rig back into Blender to re-apply it to the cartoon mesh? -Excuse my newbie-ness there if that seems like a stupid question.
- Silly question, I assume ipiSoft is limited to Biped motion? Not that I'd ever be able to get my dog to stand in a T-pose to capture quadruped motion!
- Looks as though folks using the Kinect have been able to capture walk and run cycles, among other things. I can see how overly complex motions would get messed up (ie no back flips). Again, my development is more limited right now to animating 3d Characters to be used in Unity, exported from Blender. I'm looking at basic 3d game animations: Idle, Walking, Running, Jumping, Holding a weapon or object, Picking up a box, Sitting, Maybe thowing a punch or a kick; standard interactive character movement for a 3d Game.

Based on everything else I've seen so far, the price looks right to make this kind of investment (again more for fun right now). $500-600 USD seems right, if I can really increase the productivity of animations for use in game (I really suck at making animations, not to mention the time it takes which means my wife will beat me hehe...).

Thanks all!