Hi folks:

I'm hoping to crowd source you to help with my failure analysis of what went wrong in my ipisoft motion capture videos. Any ideas on how to fix the existing videos would be much appreciated. Obviously I can't refilm the dancers since they've scattered back across the world since the workshop. If you have ideas for "next time" those will be appreciated too. Specific feedback like, "in video X at time T:TT, this is what I think happened." Hopefully this thread will be helpful to other ipisoft users.

If you go to my youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmKWLk ... c_p8aiQ4ug

and look for the videos starting with "2014", you can see several videos from a modern dance motion capture workshop I gave recently. All of them have been tracked on the first pass in ipisoft DMC with almost no manual changes.

They were all tracked with high resolution, with feet tracking, shoulders from video, and almost all of them had "flexible dance spine" set.

In general, here are the things that I think are issues in the videos (workarounds appreciated ):

1) These videos can be long - maybe too long for the normal ipisoft workflow
2) They are of professionally trained dancers who are very athletic, move very fast, and are much more flexible than the computer programmers the system may have been tested on.
3) The PS Move gloves are black - I think they might need to be a different color to help with all the horrendous arm tracking.
4) The flexible dance spine tracking setting often twists the torso 180 degrees - horror film style.
5) The PS Move headgear may hurt the tracking.
6) Prolonged contact with the legs on the floor (called "floor work" in dance) is problematic with DMC.
7) Prolonged contact between two dancers is problematic with DMC (often resulting in skeleton swapping or even flipping the skeleton upside down).

I would love to have the capability to manually zero from a joint downwards to clear up a complete foul up. This would have helped with all the dead insect arms and legs. Sometimes IK would help
but not always. The joint rotations would often end up in gimble lock and not be easily correctable - way too much time to fix manually with the current setup.

I forgot to ask the dancers to do a T-pose at the end ("next time"), so backtracking is more difficult.

Thanks for all your creative and wonderful ideas,

Michael

the dancer´s arms get lost because they are the same color as the torso, try to put a short green sleeve t-shirt , also if your gloves are black, check "Hands color same as face color" before click "analize actor appereance". also in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w07z_yH ... c_p8aiQ4ug
, I notice that the the wall behind the dancer has the same color of his t-shirt, so in brief , if the arms, torso and one wall share the same color, this will definitely give problems to the arms, the arms are the most sensitive part for ipi. put a complete Black long sleeve and a green short sleeve and you are fine, i think. Now if that doesnt work it means that maybe Ipi is not good at tracking really faster movements like that dancer does, although i have watched some dancers tracking that looks really nice. when you try it again let me know if it worked. Hope this help

ok , i have wachted more videos, and i think you have 2 problems. you are doing this in a classroom sourranding by Blackboards. although I think they are dark green, for the ps3 cams they are kind of black, notice that the second the dancer´s arm go through the baclkboards, the arms start to shake a lot, so what you can do is to block the blackboards with white sheets, you have to do that or you will always have problems with arms, also i have seen some balck equipment in the floor, blcok themm too with white sheets or white paper. now your second and most important issue is the one i already described to you which is to use the same color for arms and torso. you armas are definitely blending with the dancer´s torso and that is confusing Ipi. So keep the black long sleeve t-shirt but put a green short sleeve t-shirt to separate the arms from the torso and i think that would solve your problems.