the azure kinect is more than capable of doing hand and finger tracking without the need for a playstation move or a wii remote. Would it be possible to implement that for the azure?

Fingers are too small and too easily occluded to be captured accurately by camera-based systems capturing the body at the same time. If you want to capture fingers data at the same time, you'll probably want to add a glove-based system to capture the fingers and merge the data with the body data in your animation program.

Several years ago, I worked on a video game trailer for Fable 2, and the motion capture company we contracted for the job did essentially this but using their high-end equipment.

Personally, I find the hand system in iPi is pretty good for adding convincing finger movements quickly. It comes with basic poses and you can add your own to build a library of hand poses. The program can interpolate between the poses you select from the library. You still need to add the wrist motions but that's what the PS Move and Switch JoyCon controllers are for. Recorder can capture RGB video as well as depth data, so you have a visual reference for what the hand poses should be. (Of course, if you need to disable the RGB capture, you can optionally set up a separate video camera during the recording session.)

When I need specific hand animations, I'll add that in the target animation program afterwards. I do this using the hand-rig controls I've set up in the program but it's still a manual key-framing process, not automatic.

If you want to capture fingers data rather than animate it youself, you can capture it in a separate pass and then merge the data to the body capture. There are various systems available for this, some requiring gloves or other devices, and some using video or depth sensors. I've seen demonstrations of finger capture using Kinect sensors focused on the hands but I've never used such systems myself. You'll probably have re-time the hand motions and tweak them to match the body capture.

This is just me but I think this can be more work than it would be to just animate the fingers myself.

Hope this helps.

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Ipi Soft is a great tool, but users need to do a lot of steps (camera placement, calibration, saving background, recording, cleaning etc). I don't think people want to do separate facial and finger motion capturing. We want to save time/energy.

Ipi Soft could use Leap Motion Controller, which would be attached under each hand. That would be a simple and cheap solution.
https://www.ultraleap.com/product/leap- ... ontroller/