I had made a video from iRecorder with a single Kinect Sensor. I opened it in ipistudio and after tracked forward, I could not see any human following the actor. I made a T pose before the acting part and even leave the background with no actor before even acting. Can someone help me urgently? Thank you! It would be great to get advice here because I am a beginner to mocap.

Sorry, I am okay now! But I would like to ask a different question this time about the hands. About the hands, it look like it cannot move its fingers, from beginning to end, it doesn't move at all except the whole body movement. Any suggestions? Thank you! I also have floating issues with the legs on the rig, it doesn't touch the ground which looks like he is flying through the air.

Simple questions:
1) How do I also control the hands (fingers) and facial movement/expression, not just only the whole body part? Like blinking eyes, moving mouth?
2) I actually have brought another kinect sensor, although should I put it at the front then back or front then sideways?

THANKS!

iPi DMC only tracks body motions, no wrist or fingers. You can add wrist and finger motions motions in the animation program of your choice after you bring the iPi animation into it.

I like to use Motion Builder which has a pretty decent 'hand rig' already built-in. You can do this with any 3D animation program though.

G.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

Thanks. With the motion builder, is there a kinect tutorial for fingers and facial (mouth, eyes) tracking? I am new to it, so, help is really appreciated.

Sorry, I don't know anything about using Kinect with Motion Builder or how to capture fingers, face or anything directly in Motion Builder. I've only used the Kinect with iPi DMC and I use Motion Builder only for retargeting, editing and animation.

G.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

I have one question, why in the game with the animation seems to be floating its legs, while in the 3D program, there weren't any?

I place the two Kinects in front, about six to seven feet apart. In this configuration, the Kinects should be about 90 degrees apart but I actually have mine less than that. This is mainly because I have limited space in my living room but it works pretty decently.

You can actually place the Kinects in front and back at 180 degrees for full 360 coverage--this setup obviously requires a fairly deep room. I haven't compared accuracy between 90 and 180 yet--FWIW, I can imagine a possible a trade-off in the size of the capture space or increased jitter, but this configuration is untested by me personally. Some users here do use the 180 setup though and they have reported very good results. I would suggest trying both configurations and deciding for yourself.

Be aware that calibration is a little different between 90 and 180 configurations. There is complete information about this in the wiki.

Regarding game engine results, sorry, I have no experience there. You should provide more detailed info (for example, which game engine are you using?) and maybe somebody using the same engine can provide some insight.

Good luck!

G.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

I am using .smd format files with Milkshape program.

Thank you for your detailed suggestions! I still have some questions to ask:
1) Is there a specific problem to prevent placing the kinect at sideways?
2) Two kinects at the front, what is the benefit? Because I think one is enough to capture the front? I don't get it.
3) So you mean one at front and the other at back will give a 360 degree good rendering? e.g. would like to do a run, some dances...etc. right now doing with one kinect won't work. So if it's 360 degree, it can really process most of my movements to the camera? If the above examples are what I want to do, what would you recommend?

I just use one kinect now since only have got 1 usb cable for PC, the other one is still delivering to my home. Anyway, by using one kinect only, I find it very hard and not very satisfying about how much you can move, e.g. no sideways otherwise there will be broken joints and clipping. So what I tried was just a wave animation but when I do a running, it fails. So, hopefully when I have another usb cable, I will be able to see such a huge improvement in comparison to just having one sensor only.

Thank you, look forward to it.

Not sure what you mean by 'sideways'. Do you mean at 90 degrees? If so, this is one of the suggested 'ideal' setups for dual Kinects. The other suggested 'ideal' setup would be to place them at 180 degrees. My feeling is that the actual ideal configuration is probably somewhere in-between for reasons explained below.


By 'front', I'm talking about placing both in front at 90 degrees angles, not both cameras directly in front of the actor. 90 degrees gives iPi DMC fairly wide coverage but it also gives the volume generation process some 'data overlap' which may improve precision. That's my theory anyway.


Yes, in theory this gives you almost full coverage. But setting the Kinects this way, you also lose that 'data overlap' mentioned above, so it's possible that you may lose some precision. Well, it's a possible tradeoff anyway; to be honest, I haven't done a comparison yet. Motion capture using Kinect is still somewhat experimental so I suggest you try both configurations (and perhaps others) to see which works best for you.

FWIW, I find that the 90 degree set up still allows you to capture full 'turnaround' movements quite well. The 'chainsaw dance' sequence in 'Happy Box', for example, was shot with two Kinects placed in front, not at 180 degree, and it captured this motion just fine. (Actually, my Kinects were set at considerably less than 90 degrees because of limited space but this still worked well for me--it was much, much better than using single Kinect anyway.)

Hope this helps.

G.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

Thank you for your detailed information, I need some time to digest all the information you had put in. I think what I need to do is to wait for my other cable delivery so that I could be able to do dual kinects.

Anyway, one very weird thing when I test my animation in the game is that it floats really bad, was defying gravity, the ground looks extremely smooth (as it is carpet it doesn't really make sense) because the character's legs seem like it was ice skating on the ground. Though in my 3D program and iPi motion capture program, I do not see as bad as it looks like in the game. If you don't know, it is okay, maybe this question will leave it to others who know what's going on, as I completely have no idea why.