Anyone using foam exercise tiles for the floors of their volumes? If so, I am wondering what colors people might be having luck with. I am assuming white is the best option.

http://www.amazon.com/Sqft-Flooring-Exe ... m+flooring

I use similar foam mats on our small shooting stage--they're almost the same color as our green screen and they work great. Here's a picture of what it looks like:



We purchased ours from this vendor: http://wondermat.com/

I've never tested white but my guess is that white probably isn't the best choice with either PS3 Eye or Kinect--with PS3 Eye, white may show shadows more easily which could affect background separation quality, and with Kinect the brightness of the surface may affect the IR quality. I could be wrong though.

On other hand, if the lighting in the room isn't very bright to begin with, the bounce on white may be helpful to even out the lighting on the subject. I suggest that before you make your purchase, you could try spreading one or two white sheets on the floor and see how that affects your mocap experience.

Sorry, I hope that didn't just complicate your decision making. :)

For me, the two reasons I got my mat was to extend the green screen across the floor and to give performers a comfortable surface to work on. For the purpose of motion capture, it's not especially necessary. (Unless you plan to fall down a lot--which I do, and sometimes on purpose even.) :)

G.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

Greenlaw, thanks for the reply.

Lighting is currently not an issue, as we have access to several large pro studio lighting rigs. I think I should assume at this point that any color should work fine, assuming the volume/subjects are brightly lit and floor color is not similar to the actors clothing. That's more or less the methodology behind chromakeying as your picture demonstrated.

I think I am leaning towards white, that way any color spill caused by the floor will not dilute the colors or change color values on the subject based on volume location. As a plus white should give good bounce back up onto the subject.

Mike

If you do some tests with different floor colours Mike please post up your results, I would be really interested to see how it turns out. How do you find the green floor Greenlaw? Have you experienced any issues or foresee any issues using certain coloured flooring?

I use a dirty cream floor, the only problems I have ever had is when analyzing actor clothing, sometimes it picks the floor up as the shoe colour.

Exactly! BTW, a completely featureless background isn't necessarily ideal either because background detail can be used to calculate the ground plane and camera positions. That said, the stage above worked well when I used it for iPi mocap. (FYI, I still have the stage setup for green screen work but nowadays I do most of the motion capture in the home using dual Kinect.)


You're probably correct on this. Lighting is more of an issue with PS3 Eye and much less so for Kinect. For Kinect, all you really need in the RGB stream is to be able to see hand orientation for calibrating the Move controllers. That may change later because, if I understood correctly, iPi Soft has been experimenting with using RGB data to enhance current head tracking and other features for both systems.

Good luck! Post your findings when you can. Curious to see what you do with this.

G.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

The mat tiles are great! They have a matte finish so they don't bounce IR and they're really comfortable to perform on, especially if performers are jumping, tumbling, etc.

What you want to avoid is shiny surfaces, like polished tile or wood. Reflections will confuse PS3 Eye camera data and can misdirect IR emissions from the Kinect sensor. Our house has wooden floors, which is not good for iPi at all, but luckily we have a large rug covering most of the living room floor.

You may also want to avoid exceptionally bright light or surfaces that are too black.

G.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!