Immensely frustrating. Two problems with them.

One:
The insistence in wedging one ankle into another, consistently, no matter what you try:


I mean you can see from the picture that the other leg isn't exactly hidden from view :( Two hundred frames in a row it's insisted that the legs are there. Two hundred!

While not a complete disaster for me personally, as most of the mocap I do will focus on torso/upper shoulders, it annoys me that I've got a clear capture of the actor and yet the software insists that one ankle should be firmly embedded into the other. Plus it erodes my confidence that the mocap won't suddenly freak out in unexpected ways. I have tried:

IK'ing the leg back out straight and refitting the pose (hah! says the software, I think you'll find her leg is here!)
Adjusting the model appearance several times in several different ways
Changing the ambient lighting
Redoing the calibration a couple of times
Enabling foot tracking
Disabling foot tracking
Putting down a light coloured sheet for the actor, in case the dark carpet was interfering with the dark leggings

All to no avail.

Which leads me on to problem two:


That's four frames in a row. My actor hasn't moved. What the hell? I guess it does freak out suddenly in unexpected ways :)

I mean sometimes it loses track of an arm and I can IK the arm back into place and chances are it'll recover. Fine with that. This leg thing though?! I can see the damn leg onscreen, it's there - arrrgh!

I've got four hours of mocap to process that this girl kindly gave me her time for, and a lot of it does involve moving/sitting so I really want this to work! I can sense it's close, but I want it closer :)

-Ian

Usually Enabling Foot Tracking does it well for me.

Troubleshooting could be:

1.) DMC is getting confused on the white sheet from the white shoe.

2.) The lighting might be a problem.

3.) Try "fattening" up the actor's arms, legs and torso using the sliders under the actor tab. I have a feeling this helps on the tracking effort.

It is hard to say what is wrong without looking at the original video.
Could you send me the video (with corresponding calibration video) by email - I promise we will only use it for debugging.

By the way, our software is not yet optimized for tracking female characters. We are still working on morph shapes for female body, this involves serious redesign of tracker internals since we have to support dozens of additional morph shapes without slowing down the tracker.

However, in this particular case, it is obvious that the main problem is with something else. If you can send us a debug video, I think we'll be able to fix it.

Ah well I get the crazy legs syndrome with me doing the mocap as well, although yes, I did notice the model isn't too good a match against the female form haha

I'll try and get you a load of sample files - my cal alone is 50mb though, might need to upload it somewhere for you.

This software is capable of great things, right now it's doing very well with me leaning onto my elbow and crossing my hands, so I find it odd that simple stationary legs throws it sometimes! Hopefully you'll find something relatively simple in the recordings.

-Ian

OK so I narrowed the legs of the model when processing video that I'm in and suddenly it's working pretty well :) I'm sure I tried that before, but I might have narrowed them too far. It can have a bit of a fit at the start and sometimes the legs cross over but they tend to recover a few frames afterwards!

I'm also finding it's tracking the arms well, sometimes it loses one with a fast movement but you can IK it back into place after a couple of frames.

I'll still try and get the example videos to you Michael, I'm at work 12hrs a day at the moment so haven't got much time, but the more community generated videos you've got to test things with the better, I reckon.

In fact, if you want, I can post you a DVD with all my recordings so far, I've got probably an hour's worth of captureable footage!

-Ian

Ian,

I received the test video you sent me, thank you. In that particular video, the problem is caused by dark floor and overall low contrast and low saturation - the system just can't see the black pants on black background. I think that video was recorded using very low lighting and probably reduced exposure setting. You can improve results by using brighter lighting and blue jeans instead of black pants.

It is still not clear why there is a problem with legs on the original video (the video from the beginning of this forum thread). There seems to be good contrast between dark legs and light floor.

A DVD with recordings would be greatly appreciated. I will contact you by email to try to arrange this.

Wait, can we help your debugging process by sending you videos? If you do, what specifically the kind of videos you guys are looking for? Those videos which you get alot of miscalibration?

Yes, sure, that would help us greatly. We would appreciate any videos - not necessarily miscalibration. Most of all we are interested in your "average" videos - that would help us to better understand typical usage patterns and optimize accordingly.

We can sign appropriate NDA if you require it.

Simplest way to send us a video is to upload it somewhere and send us a link by email. If you want to send large number of videos on DVD I can contact you by email and we can arrange this.