Greenlaw wrote:
To me, the technique in the video appears to be an 'iPi DMC' variation of manual matchmoving or 'rotocapture', where the animator visually matches the position of limb to what he sees in a background video (or in this case a 3D point cloud.)
This technique is definitely not the same as tracking, at least not in the way iPi DMC automatically tracks motion. Rotocapture is a technique we used to use back when didn't have access to motion capture equipment or services. It'a a 'brute force' technique you can do in any 3D animation program--'old school' but still useful. If you need to animate an entire body, rotocapture can be tedious but it's not so bad if you're only concerned with one extremity like the head.
Anyway, short answer: iPi DMC does not automatically track the head motion for you like it does with the arms, legs, and torso. It does let you rotate the head joint manually, like you can with other joints.
IMO, if you're going take the time to manually animate the neck and head joints, it's easier to do this in a 3D animation program. For example, in many 3D programs, you could set up a target object for the head to 'look at' and simply animate the position of the target. This way you can can get the character to look exactly where it should be looking. (When using original mocap data, chances are good that your character is not going to be looking where you want when it's imported to your 3D environment, and you'll probably want to manually edit the neck/head rotation anyway.)
My understanding is that iPi Soft plans to introduce automatic head and wrist tracking in iPi DMC 2.0, which will track the way version 1.0 currently does for arms, legs, and torso.
Hope that's a little more clear.
G
ahhh makes sense now
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