Hi,

I am working on a project where we would like to motion capture the movements of a 40cm tall wooden rod puppets (in 3D space) in order to capture the unique movement that this will produce. The puppets are build much like humans ie. two arms, legs, hands, head, torso, pelvis.


(like this but only 40 cm tall)

We are planning on using two kinect's via Motion builder.

I was wondering if anyone had had success capturing non-human motion or similar.

Any input would be great!

Cheers in advance.

JaegerJensen

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My question to this would be:

Why would you want to use a 40cm puppet, when it is easier and more stable to capture a human doing the same motions, then apply it to your puppet size in Motion Builder?

This isn't a real-time system, so you can't puppet to appear in live action video.

As you know the Kinects are based on depth perception and a point cloud, so anything in the point cloud will become trackable, (i.e. the "rods"), and may cause severe issues in the tracking process, thinking that part of the depth is a leg, arm, puppeteer, etc, but you could minimize this with a separation curtain with the puppeteers behind it and closer to the puppet, you just would have to test it out.

There are fans of the Kinect sensors, I am not one of them, but maybe some can offer more experience as to the tracking ability for the process you want to perform.

Four, or more PS Eyes would give a cleaner tracking result in my opinion, as the "rods" wouldn't get detected as long as were a completely different color than the puppets clothing, bones if a skeleton as shown, white is a good color to use for PS Eyes not to detect, but also depends on the characters appearance and the background colors present.

This is most likely a "try it and see" for the process you are attempting with Kinect sensors.

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I see you want to capture "unique motion" produced by the puppets, which may, or may not track well.

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