Hallo again,

this is my second entry in the blog in the course of some days and I though I would share some thoughts about motion capture.
As I said before we are in the final stages of our project and are now incorporating the
motion capture data that we recorded from the fashion model.
We had to find out that the data was very hard to correct and we had a tough time to get a complete catwalk motion together. Moritz did the motion blending and it was certainly no joy for him at all.
Even a state of the art motion capture system like the one we use (Vicon MX) will always involve dealing with certain offsets in the marker data. Most likely you won’t be able to perfectly capture exactly the same motion as it was performed. Even when in the end the motion looks realistic it will contain offsets, although they might be in the range of a few millimetres or less.
The problem is not so much to precisely locate the markers in space as this can done with high precision by the infrared cameras. The step which involves most offsets is to finally calculate (or technically spoken: to solve) the underlying skeleton.
Marker placement is a crucial step in reducing this offset as much as possible, because a combination of 3 or more markers is used to calculate the rotation of a joint. A bad marker placement will result in bad quality data, as simple as that.
Each motion has its characteristics and thus marker placement has to be adjusted to capture these characteristics as good as possible.
Even though big motion capture studios have a so called full body marker set which might work well for 80% of their customers they nevertheless have to rethink their marker set for specific cases.
But in the end motion capture remains THE technology for realistic CG motion. The offsets I was talking about are in most cases negligible small and won’t harm the captured motion.
Anybody who is seeking a realistic touch to his animated CG project should consider implementing motion capture. And when you ask yourself where to get mocap data from…

www.mocapdata.com 

BYE