Hey guys

It's a little daunting posting on here for the first time but I thought it would be best to get involved in the community as much as possible and try to help/be helped where needs be.

To give you a run down, I am a third year student at Staffordshire University studying games design and will be writing my final year dissertation using markerless motion capture as the basis. My dissertation paper is currently titled "Investigating markerless motion capture solutions for independent developers". My aim is to bring the markerless technology a little bit more in the spot light and enable smaller companies to enjoy the benefits of what markerless motion capture has to offer.

I worked with iPi for about a week about 4 months ago on a project I was working on. I was basically asked to create a full animation set for characters in an FPS style game. Though it is not perfect I thought i would share with you the work I have done before I embark on this journey into really pushing the limitations of the markerless solution.

Here is a trailer that was made using my anims - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Bu36lUM2lk
Here is some gameplay footage with my anims included - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... FPxkwCgJMc
and here is a video I used to demonstrate to my lecturers that it was actually worth pursuing the topic ;) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRwlQMo9Oj8

Well I guess that is my introduction done :) Thankfully I have access to a large mocap area in the University and will be conducting new tests as often as I can.

Hey I know!

If you have any tests you would like me to conduct using iPi in the environment I have access to, let me know! I already have plans to get two people captured BEFORE the update using a bit of crafty workings but I am open to anything!

Thanks for your time, I hope to be of some use in the community as time goes on :)

Oli

Hi ManyMotion,

Cool to see someone working in this field for a dissertation. A little about me, im a lead animator at a game studio, and right now we are using iPi to see how it'll work for us mainly in the cinematic area. I was actually wondering if you could go over your workflow a bit, or just some highlights of stuff to do / not do. Right now I'm trying to get our PS3 setup working a bit beter. My last test with 3 PS cameras went well, but had some issues with feet tracking (which i think may be cause of shoe color) but also had an issue with the grid being too high and not being to get the height worked out properly. Thanks and welcome to the community.


-chris

Hey Chris!

Funnily enough the cinematic area is something I want to focus on heavily in my dissertation but I will be conducting some early tests to determine best practices. Out of interest what type of cinematic stuff are you wanting to do? Maybe I can customize my tests to accommodate helping your criteria better?

I will quite happily outline my workflow sometime next week. I need to pick up some new equipment and some items for some new ideas and then I will be good to go. As for your issues with feet tracking, I found that the calibration is the most integral part to getting this to work properly. make sure your calibration is thorough and that you hit 4 (or more) floor points in order to appropriately set the grid. I will be messing with shoe colour when I do my tests but it sure wouldn't hurt to swap out some different shoes to see what gives you the best result.

Let me know about the cinematics and ill see what I can do :)

Can you say what company you work for or, is that a little hush hush ;)?

Oli

Hey Oli,

I work at nFusion interactive, a video game company focusing primarily in mobile games. Thanks for sharing your info, especially your new tests. I am going to try and do some more tests this weekend possibly with four cams and see how that goes, stay in touch.



-chris