I have two kinect setup of a 90degree angle, in a 4mx4m room. I took the board to calibrate and Ipi Studio reported 6 "good frames". I don't know if it is good enough? But my experience with Ipi is not up to that level of my first thoughts of the demo clips. I'm running a macbook pro, Core 2 duo, 8GB DDR3 Ram, 256MB graphic card.
Ipi studio was not able to track my very basic poses and moves. After 2 days of thinking and experienting, I belive the software is build based on egonomics of caucasian, not asian. Asian guys like me tend to have shorter limbs, which demonstrated as the following screen capture:


Although I always pose a straight T-Pose and declare my height right, my knees are always bended


I put the hands 60cm in front of me but the software detected them crossed over my belly :)


This is more obvious: my feet are on the floor but the software put me in the air with a Yoga lotus pose

I've been testing this for a week with no success. I also tried to adjust the skeleton bones but the software won't allow me to do anything except rotating som specific joints.

Please let me know any steps that I missed?

Thank you!

Yes, certainly, you may be right that our model is better suited for caucasian actors than asian. We plan to add more customization to the model in later versions (most probably in v3), including limb proportions. However, I do not think that is the main problem with your poor mocap experience. We have many asian customers who successfully employ our software.

First, let's ensure you have good enough calibration. 6 good frames are absolutely not sufficient. At least few hundred frames are needed for good calibration results. Common problems for having low good frames values are:

• Too small calibration board. Should be at least 50x70cm.
• Neither vertical, nor horizontal orientation of the board.
• Board is rotated far away from facing one of the sensors, making it look very non-rectangular in its view.
• Confusing the board with the person, when either holding it by the corner, or taking too close to the body. Hold the board by the middle of its side in a straight arm.

Also remember to make some move of the board while shooting the calibration video - forward, backward, left, right. The range of 1m is sufficient. This is needed to correctly determine positions of the sensors.

Next, for the action shots. I see you wear baggy shorts while doing action. It's not good clothes for mocap. You should wear some tighter clothes to have better correspondense to the actor's model in the software. Also I recommend you to wear shoes to add more volume to your feet. That will make your feet more visible to the depth sensors (now they are barely distinguishable from the floor).

I'm Asian, well half-asian anyway. I'm not sure if the following is an 'asian' trait but one issue I've run into when using iPi Mocap Studio is that my torso is slightly longer than what it expects or perhaps my legs are shorter. I think this might be why Mocap Studio seems to have more trouble fitting the spine in 'flexible spine' mode when I'm doing the performances, but only for certain poses. I know I've already asked in another thread but it would be nice if segments of the Actor's body were adjustable.

In spite of this issue, I able to get successful results from the software most of the time. Sometimes, I need to use two different actor heights depending on the pose or motion I'm trying to capture, so you may wish to experiment with that. (I demonstrated in another thread that sitting or crouching can be a problem when tracking my performances unless I scale the Actor down for those poses.)

Somewhat interesting note: my wife and I are exactly the same height but her legs are quite a bit longer than mine and the Actor seems to match her form a bit better.

FYI, I read in another thread that iPi Soft intends to make the Actor more fully customizable but this wouldn't happen before version 3.0.

G.

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Greenlaw
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