Hi,

hoping the voices of experience can advise things i am doing wrong....

1. I have set up 4 Playstation Eye cameras.
2. I have calibrated the cameras and the distances i needed to manually adjust... but then when i 'recalibrated' they were within 50cm of the actual measurements
3. I set up the 'T-pose' and adjusted that
4. I then set about recording a few movements (this is for martial arts so it was a few punches)....

It then took 10 hours to 'track forward' and what i am seeing is not close to the movements I am doing....

So since i don't want to wait another 10 hours after tweaking some stuff would love some advice....


Things to mention are:
- The current location is a trial... a proof of concept before creating a proper work area... It is in my office space which is very messy (don't judge me ;-))- 'but' i understood that if you did your background in the set up this would not have an impact.
I 'could' just put some sheets over the 'mess' for my next trial but would appreciate if this is necessary?

- The cameras in iPi Studio are:
-- height 1 - 2504mm (actual 2565)
-- height 2 - 1690mm (actual 1740)
-- height 3 - 1992mm (actual 2020)
-- height 4 - 1591mm (actual 1620)
are these values close enough?

- I did this at night where there was a light source from the top... would this have any impact?

What would you suggest my next course of action should be?

(I have attached 4 images from each camera incase they are of any use?

Look forward to any feedback

Hi

Camera heights. It seems that you only need to adjust the "Scene scale" value a bit up after the calibration to get the values more close to real.
Processing time. What GPU do you have? If you are using a laptop with dual graphics, ensure that Mocap Studio is running on descrete graphics.
Tracking accuracy. It is better to have the clothes of colors highly different from the background (like red, green) and between body parts than making the background to look uniform. In your situation a T-shirt over long sleeves (or just long-sleeved shirt) is preferred because the skin color looks close to the walls color. The bright uniform lighting is also of a big value: you should prevent the shades on an actor.

10 hours! That does sound very extreme.

I would check that your graphics card is suitable for using iPi Mocap Studio. On my system, many of my initial tracks take only a few minutes to solve, and exceptionally long sequences still stay well under an hour, and I'm using an aging GTX 460.

Processing times with more recent GTX cards will be much faster than what I'm getting. In general, any of the recent GTX cards should perform well.

As for tracking errors, it's hard to say what's going on without seeing the capture footage. Can you show the volume? Seeing only the bones is not very useful for troubleshooting.

From looking at the stills, the room looks a bit small for PS3 capture. If you don't have a larger space available, you might consider dual Kinect.

Hope this info helps and 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 think your manual camera placement is wrong, look at the ipi grid, it doesnt match the shape of the room, before calibrating the cameras, place them manually with the tools you have (pan,orbit,zoom,tilt nad move) , match the grid with the sides of the room and always take the ipi model as a reference, in all cameras, the mesh should be in the middle(doesnt matter if the mesh ddosnt look exactly in the middle for all cameras), then save the scene file so you wont spent time placing the cameras manually again, then unchecked both options "auto detect initial..." and "auto adjust camera FOV" you dont need them, since you already place the cameras manually and when you import the video the FOV was already set, this options are in the calibration tab, then hit calibration, when it finishes, create the ground plane selecting ground points(3 minimum, more is better) then scale the scene with the scale slider and pay attention only to the distance between camera 1 and 2 , the other values, the height values for each cameras, should be set about right while you are setting the distance value right, if there is a little bit to set the height values , play with the "ground height fine tunning" after. these are the steps to follow to get a perfect calibration. NO NEED TO RE-CALIBRATE, ONLY ONCE and after set ground plane,distance between camera 1 and 2 and ground height tunning , you just save the scene xml file which is the one you will use for tracking.
About tracking , you have to use correct clothes, your arms and your torso are clearly blending with the walls. I recommend you to use a black long sleeve t-shirt(although I think your arms can blend with your black furniture and cause problems again) and over that, a green(not dark , not light)t-shirt, then in ipi studio and before tracking the animation, play with camera properties for each cam to make you stand over the background, you should look like a bad photoshop composition, I mean you should look like a layer that just has drop over a background layer and both layer dont match or blend, this way you will have a perfect tracking. Hope this helps.

awesome suggestions - thank you .... i'll try them out and update the post on how i go....

Wicq is correct about wearing proper clothing for PS3 capture. Here are a couple of PS3 Eye videos I made a few years ago that show what you should be wearing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2KLtGsl ... BolBFkLO9o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo4bz4uc ... 4NpzsvoL7o

The idea it to have contrast against the background. The colored sleeves give contrast against the torso, and the black shirt minimizes shadow on the torso. When shooting with PS3, lighting is also critical--you want to avoid hard dark shadows as much as you can. While it may seem like overkill, I like to use two or three softboxes to light for PS3--if you place them correctly, you can get flat even lighting with very soft shadows.

Just my opinion but I still think your room may be too small for PS3 capture. Back when I used PS3 cameras, I would shoot in a two car garage and that was just barely big enough for a semi-circle arrangement. Alternatively, you might consider shooting outdoors on overcast days or very early in the morning before the sun rises too high.

If all this sounds like too much trouble, then I highly recommend using dual Kinect. This is what I use most of the time. Calibration is much easier and it doesn't require special lighting or clothing. You want to avoid a lot of sunlight though to minimize IR pollution--I typically shoot at night to avoid this problem. The dual Kinect configuration also requires far less room to use--with this configuration, I can shoot in my living room, which is a fairly small space. I use a small laptop with the free Team Viewer to remote control iPi Recorder running on my workstation in another room. This setup is much simpler than using PS3 Eye cameras and more productive for my current needs.

G.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

hmmm... ok ...

The end goal is to film various martial arts moves for some learning dvds (and at that point some will include 2 people but I'll be able to use the dojo so will have more room)

Prior to that i need to 'test' the end-to-end concept, produce a demo and also get an appreciation of effort involved.

Based on all your input i think i might grab a couple of kinnects to continue this proof of concept.

much appreciated.

one more question :-) ...

if i try the Kinect, i am just wanting to produce a simple demo of myself doing some hand moves (various punching combinations and blocks).... would you recommend 1 or 2 kinects for this initial trial?

thanks again

graham

you will use a dojo , which I can imagine is big, I would go for the 4 ps3 cams you already have instead of buying 1 or 2 kinects, Ps3 cams is better than using 1 or 2 kinects, you can walk around wherever you wont in your space which is limited with kinect. Also , if you are planning to use ipi for martial motions, get 2 ps3 moves for your hands/wrist movements and check head tracking in ipi studio which is actually a good feature. having a 3rd ps3 move attached to your head is unconfortable , I can imagine it will be a problem when doing karate, the in-built head tracking in ipi studio is good enough.

Oh, there's something to consider, especially since you're shooting martial arts: Kinect isn't quite as accurate for fast motions as six PS3 Eye cameras. (It's always something isn't it?)

That said, dual Kinect has about the same accuracy as four PS3 Eye cameras, so maybe it won't matter.

If you intend to use multi-actor capture, you'll need at least six PS3 eye cameras. From what I'm reading, it might not work very well with only four PS3 Eyes and I'm pretty sure it doesn't work with Kinect capture.

I use dual Kinect for multiple characters who interact with each other but I don't record that way. What I do is I shoot each character in a separate pass but the performances are coordinated to a common audio track and/or video reference--this keeps the individual performances more or less 'in sync'. If any positional tweaking is needed, I do that Motion Builder, but keeping the timing of the motions in sync is not an issue when the actions are carefully choreographed this way.

If you really want to use Kinect, definitely go for dual kinects, especially if you intend to shoot very active motions. For example, dual Kinect can capture full rotations (as seen here: Sister's Mocap Test.) The actions in this video were shot in my living room using dual Kinects; it would be very difficult to shoot this 'walkaround' motion using only a single Kinect and it most likely it will fail.

The next question is which controllers do you want: Kinect for Windows or Kinect for XBox? I recommend Kinect for XBox. These cost more but they are guaranteed to be supported for Windows in the future, and they currently have a few features not available in Kinect for XBox.

Alternatively, you could try Carmine 1.08, which produces cleaner data than Kinect. If you decide to go with Carmine, be sure to get 1.08 for full body capture. Version 1.09 is intended for closeup scanning and it's not suitable for full body capture.

G.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!