Quote - This is the most exciting Poser development in years.  Are you suggesting that it is possible to make Facial-motion capture as well as body motion capture?  If you can pull this thing off you'll be able to retire at a very young age.  Good luck and please keep us all posted.

Facial Capture is nothing new. Its been done already. Heck even a logitech webcam thats out does facial capture so you can overly your face with a character while webcaming. But Imagine this guy is looking to create a capture system that is really good yet inexpensive

Wow this is awesome. I want I want. But I'll have to save save and save if I want

Pete

Quote - I suggest DAZ, as reseller.

My best wishes to yoshi-mocap
Fulvio

 

Curious Labs or DAZ would probably be very interested in purchasing a license to include it bundled with some new release of Poser or DAZ Studio. This would make these products extremely competitive with Motionbuilder.

This I think is why the initial price should be extremely reasonable, even under 1000. Yoshi won't get rich by selling them one at a time for 2 grand, but will definitely get rich selling the rights to the product to a larger company like Curious Labs. And with less work on his part.

Daz or  or Poser Owners wouldn't I don't think. Since Poser and Daz's [rpduct isn't  pointed at the the professional. I still want it though

PLus it can't be lower than 2k as a total package because the Optitrack lights by themselves cist $1,494 for 6

Yoshi has a couple of new video tests up on his site. Does this mean the app is closer to prime time?

And a big bump a de bump bump! Anyone heard anything from Yoshi about his progress?

If you check out the updated Optitrack Site, it looks like Yoshi and the Optitrack folks got together and Optitrack will be offering Yoshi's software along with their cameras--compare Yoshi's 05/05/06 Poser sample: http://www.geocities.com/mocap_is_fun/ (scroll down to the 05/05/06 sample) with the video of the new interface at Optitrack: http://www.naturalpoint.com/optitrack/products/videos.html (scroll down to the "full body" video The interfaces are almost identical, but the movement of the character is absolutely identical. I'm really not surprised--tho I am very pleased--with this development. I've been salivating over Yoshi's updates to his site since the Spring, and actually called Optitrack months ago to ask them about software solutions, and the person I talked to made a reference to somebody who was working on a bvh solution, so, tho they said they didn't have any plans to produce software, it seems like Yoshi was at least already on their radar. Anyway, if they can keep the cost down to around $2000 or so for a complete system, it's going to revolutionize 3D animation as we know it. I know it will revolutionize my life! --Tim http://www.auroratrek.com

Attached Link: V3 Benching Pressing

I'd be very interested in a low-cost Do It Yourself poser-slanted mocap system.

Budget of, say, $3000? (always gross up and moshi should make plenty, I'd say.)
Acceptable for  this solution.

Dance moves, both classical, like ballet, and modern or even nightclub, important. Since in ballet the dancers move across the stage, this 'small space' could still be used, but you'd have to get crafty.

When the subject of facial mocap arrises, two benchmarks I'd cite would by

Face Robot, from XSI  ($100,000)
http://www.softimage.com/products/face_robot/default.aspx

StretchMark, by Pendulum
http://www.studiopendulum.com/news_markantony.html
They are trying to do what FaceRobot does, but for lower cost. I don't think this is a released product yet.

other links

Dancing bvh at Turbo Squid:
http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/187368/Action/FullPreview

Gypsy (mentioned above by DaleB)
http://www.animazoo.com/products/index.htm

Note: for anyone wanting to go very low cost, and also learn a lot about body movement, check out the idea of rotoscope; PhilC has a Poser-based rotoscope enabling system in the marketplace.

$3000 dollars is a bit steep for ordinary users, even $2000 is a lot unless you make videos for tv.

Yes, $2000 is still a lot compared to Poser etc., but it would be an order of magnitude difference compared to the nearest mocap solution, and would put it in the range of a lot of people that couldn't even dream of shelling out $30,000 for a mocap system (okay,  I dreamed, but that's about as far as I got!) For $2000, it seems like if you had a small group of animators chipping in together, they could share the cost. Also, $2000 would put it into the range of many schools who might want to add mocap to their media labs--heck, even a good-sized high school could probably come up with that.--Tim

Oy! I checked back at the Optitrack website, and they admitted a mistake on their website, and now they say that their full body mocap solution won't be available until Fall 2007, instead of Spring 2007. I'm dyin' here! Yoshi had this working for Poser back in March 2006, but they're gonna make us wait for a freakin' year and a half from that??? But, speaking not just for myself, you'd think they'd be thinking about their own sales: I may not be a hardware/software manufacturer, but I do know that technology time is like dog years--6 months is like 6 years in tech time. By not siezing on this opportunity they are running the risk of somebody swooping in and eating their lunch. Already the technology exists were you can calculate mocap from one camera (as seen in the "making of" Pirates of the Carribean II) so it might be just a matter of time before Optitrack's 6 camera array is obsolete. Right now that one-camera tech is really high-end software, but things change very quickly. Maybe it's just me, but if I were Optitrack, I'd get this solution to market ASAP--every day they delay they're just losing money!

Please continue with this.  I do a ton of animations, but they are for my friends and family, and have been doing so for years now.  I would love this software.  $2000 or even $3000 may seem like a lot of money, but I have been wanting something like this for years.  I would gladly pay several thousands of dollars for it.  :)
Please, Please, Please don't stop working on this....  this is very cool.

Keep in mind we don't know the final cost of the software itself; the $2,000 that Yoshi quoted was for the 6 Optitrack cameras, USB 2 hubs, tripods, markers, and halogen spotlights he bought. It may be another 2k, or it could be considerably cheaper. But yah, a nine month lead time is going to be a bit much. But I can think of one reason for it. A good sized manual. Those do take time to write, particularly if you have to pick the brain of a coder for the fiddly details that are 2nd nature to them, but no one else. And if Yoshi is writing it himself, then a good technical editing and clean-up can take just as long. The one thing I wish I knew for certain is that Yoshi's app =is= coming out. That way I could start saving up for the cameras one by one........

Quote - The one thing I wish I knew for certain is that Yoshi's app =is= coming out. That way I could start saving up for the cameras one by one........

I feel the same way. I think it's unfortunate that Yoshi started this thread but appears to have abandoned it. A simple message giving us some sort of update would be greatly appreciated.

YOSHI, ARE YOU LISTENING?

I this is a comercial product, I think it would be in the showcase forum...

he may have abandoned, and that would be impolite and more than impolite. He may have also struck a deal with the company, and they might have made him commit to not discussing the project in open forums. Still, he should at least come back and say that.

Yoshi, are you listening?

::: og :::

The Optitrack system is definitely Yoshi's software, you only need to look at his site and theirs. I am really glad that they got together, I think that's really much better in terms of support, etc. And I didn't mean to sound negative--okay, maybe I meant to sound somewhat negative--I guess I'm just really frustrated to have mocap dangling in front of me for years, seemingly just out of reach, while at the same time I can't figure out why it's taking them so long to bring it out. I'm generally a patient person--you have to be to animate--but I just want this so badly!

I just perused their site again and see that the earlier version of the camera, the one that was just mounted on a circuit board, is no longer available. Instead they have a boxed version at $350.00 that includes a Sync Splitter box. The timing issue is probably raising it's ugly little head here.

They are touting greyscale sensitivity as well now whereas the earlier camera was 1-pixel threshold only. I'm guessing that this would help eliminate data loss from poor reflectance angles. Since they are calculating the Z-vector algorithmically from a known three-point cluster, not directly, they could ill afford to drop samples. 

I'd personally like to know more about the ILM iMoCap system used in "Dead Man's Chest." They are apparently pulling all the data from just two visual streams, checkered bands and a minimal number of marker balls. I saw some of the original ILM setup & footage at a conference in Montreal in September and they are seriously on to something. (Having a 5000 processor render farm does come in handy.) This must be based upon the system that was used to recreate Parisian architecture from a hot air balloon.

Monster House on the other hand used 200 cameras, 80 markers on the body, another 72 on the face and no real environments at all. Wireframe props galore so markers were not occluded. But then they took it to a whole other level by creating the ability to move the camera around the MoCap-driven action in real time using the equivalent of a Worral head. Just like flying around in a VR environment or first-person shooter. Still had to render everything from there, but they had a database of character MoCap with integrated camera motion control for the render. Everything had originated from a real-time, multistream analog input! No freakin' mousing around one axis at a time for those guys.

Anybody ready to hack Poser to give 6-DOF joystick control of the Dolly Camera?

 
<,"]]$$$><<  
 

I am exhausted just reading that.

Last night I screened Disney's Pochahontas. I became completely convinced that they filmed the large movements of characters and then rotoscoped. Some of the body movements are just too damned perfect, nuanced and elegant to be pure hand-keyed animation.

Sure enough, at the end, down in the credits and by no means conspicuous is a block of credits for "reference movement cast."

My gut tells me they did the facial animation in the old-school disney cell drawing fashion. I may be wrong. There surely was a lot of hand keyframing going on, because there were plenty of "in-betweeners" and "rough inbetweeners" in the credits.

So...mocap? What about just filming actors moving and using them for reference and 'scoping over them? Seems simpler, way less costly, less 'uncanny valley' and more drawing-like.

::::: Opera :::::

It's a little-known fact that Disney Studios has been using rotoscoping since "Snow White". 

Rotoscoping was invented in the late nineteen-twenties by his rivals, Max and Dave Fleischer, for their silent "Out of the Inkwell" cartoons featuring Koko the Clown. The technique was quite advanced by the early thirties. When Disney started working on feature-length cartoons, it was important to animate humans in such a way that they could carry a story dramatically. Disney's animators shot reference film in live-action, using actors (often the ones who provided the characters' voices), for virtually every "human" character, and quite a few non-human ones as well. Much of this reference film still exists in the Disney vaults today.

The studio never called it "rotoscoping" becuse they didn't just trace over the film exactly, the way the Fleichers had. They exaggerated certain movements to give charcaters more of a "cartoony" feeling. So they always referred to it instead as reference film.

But, yeah, Disney animators have been rotoscoping since the very first full-length feature ever animated.

-jjsemp

yes, I sensed that they always "backfill" inexactness, what you call exaggeration.  I first heard about Disney's use of reference and it being all the way back to Snow White was about four years ago, and I remember some small sense of letdown, although I wouldn't call it betrayal. Now that I have attempted to make Poser's models move through space in a natural way, my letdown has vanished! Mercy.

The first time I sensed they were 'lessening' the deliberate cartooniness was with Anastasia. The movement in that film was beautiful. I think they are less cautious about being exact in later days is because of contrast with all the mocap and other 3d effects, which did not seem shy about being so very close to literal. Disney remains 'once removed' still, although I have not seen any Disney from the last four or five years.

And you know, somewhere in the dynamic between highly literal and highly cartoony one might find a "style."

I really liked Pocahontas.

::::: Opera :::::

Yeah, for the hobbiest or the poor film-maker, Rotoscoping is a very legitimate way to go.  Nice thing about Poser is that you can load an animation into the background.

The downside is that you now have to key frame everything yourself and, yes, this can be very time consuming.  The other downside is that your video footage is 2D and when you start moving your camera around to tweak things, your reference is useless.

Still, there is a lot more potential there.  I've got a pretty big project coming up and I've been looking into mocap for a long time.  A big problem I've run into loading up BVH files is that the mocap doesn't always translate joint movements correctly.  A recent test I did resulted in the figure's arms pivoting in an impossible way on the elbow.  Clearly the original actor's arm was twisted, so the action was natural, but the available mocap doesn't differentiate where the bicep and tricep is, for example.

Pretty much every mocap file I've tested would require so much reworking that I'm thinking the rotoscoping approach will be less work!

Attached Link: CLICK HERE FOR "ROTOSCOPER"

-jjsemp

Thanks jjsemp!

Scifi action poses. Fantasy action poses. ACTION poses. Things that could used be for battles.

Pistols firing, lightsaber clashes, running while holding a gun.

Eclipse Studios has a few of these, but there is not a lot of versatility from what I have seen so far.

I read that even with all the technology, the Pirates method required a lot of manual cleanup, but  I suppose it was a calculated tradeoff to give them the ability to have all the actors in the shots. Of course, when you've got tons of money and people you can do that. I'd just like a solution that saves me time, so I'm hoping that Optitrack's system is relatively clean and doesn't need a lot of cleanup. Yoshi's sample on his site shows a Poser figure animated with what he says is uncleaned output from his system, and it looks great.

--Tim

The film monster house used all motion capture for the figure animation and they used facial motion capture for the characters` expressions.

The film is not too bad, but it could have been funnier.

Monster House, to me, suffered almost from too much realism for the design of the characters: the backgrounds, lighting, textures  and motions of the characters were so realistic that I thought the cartoony proportions of the characters look weird at times, like people in big-head costumes. I thought they should have stylized the backgrounds & textures more, like in "Incredibles"

I disagree, as I said earlier the only thing I didnt like was that it wasnt very funny.

I was wondering when someone was going to mention PhilC's Rotoscoper.

I think it would be interesting to do a comparison between mocap & rotoscoping.

BVH gets you off the ground faster but requires a lot of clean up and detailing. Rotoscoping requires more work up front. But I wonder which approach actually gets you to the finish line fastest? (Ideally, the "finish line" would be a short, narrative animation sequence with high-quality , realistic motion.  In other words, not just a stripped-down BVH action like "swinging a light saber.")

It would be interesting to see if there IS any difference, and if so how much.

BTW - Anastasia was NOT Disney. It was Don Bluth.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118617/

I beta tested philcs rotoscoper, for short animations it is probably faster than actual motion capture but for long animations it might not really be much faster because you have to do each frame individually, though once you get used to philcs rotoscoper it might be easier to do longer animations

xantor, did phil send you video or did you actually set up two cameras and make your own reference film?

"BTW - Anastasia was NOT Disney. It was Don Bluth."<<

Did anybody mention "Anastasia?"

I don't think so.

We were talking about "POCHAHONTAS," which was indeed a DISNEY film.

As for Phil Cookes's ROTOSCOPER, you don't need to do your animation literally frame by frame. You can use Rotoscoper to set up key frames every ten frames or so, depending on the motion. That saves a lot of time.

By the way, here's another COOL TRICK.

Okay now, pay close attention:

There's this program called ENDORPHIN that lets you make all kinds of neat synthesized motions for 3D human figures. The real version of the program saves the motions out as BVH files and such. However, the real version of the program also costs $10,000.00. 

YIKES!

But there's a FREE training version of the program that lets you save your motions as AVI files.

And guess what you can then plug right into ROTOSCOPER?

That's right -- good old AVI files.

So you can use the free version of ENDORPHIN to synthesize motions for use in ROTOSCOPER as a guide for your Poser animations.

See, I just saved you $10,000.00 and I don't even know you.

Here's the link for ENDORPHIN:

http://www.naturalmotion.com/ele.htm

-jjsemp

Has anyone looked at IClone? There might be a way to use their technology both for body movement and with facial. I don't know about it myself, just posing the question. (no pun intended) It would be great if somehow it could be incorprated into Poser. I'm not that smart so somebody with more knowledge than me might be able to figure it out.

I mentioned Anastasia above, early this morning. (Why don't they number these posts, damn it.)

I stand corrected on the studio for that film. I liked it a lot. Thanks for the info.

But damn it, I also mentioned phils rotoscoper in my first post in this thread on Dec26th.  

So.....Pay attention you guys!  Operaguy on board.

Very cool endorphin strategy! I checked them out a while back. It's very exciting tech. but not the 'sweet spot' for me because I am not into action, chases, falls, rag doll, etc. But now that you mention this path...I am going to look again.

::::: Opera :::::

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