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Re: Why is motion capturing so expensive? [Re: ventilator] #182288
02/08/08 02:14
02/08/08 02:14
Joined: May 2005
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U.S.
Why_Do_I_Die Offline
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Well just making the motions by hand is prolly the best option , since most mocap needs a ton of tweaking anyway, it's prolly harder to tweak motion capture than to make motions from scratch. Thats why there's tons of motions you can buy in a lot of places but very few usable loopable motions for games ,the reason being that you have to hand tweak them to be any good for a game. So , your best option is to learn how to animate yourself , or get a good animator , motion capture is pretty much useless , studios use it , but they have animators who tweak it , and from what i've been told they also do a lot of their motions from scratch. Here is a very cheap motion capture alternative anyone can do , and the results are very good.

All you need is 2 cameras and 1 room , this is what you do. You designate a spot in the middle or on a side where you are goinng to stand , and you place 1 camera infront of you and one on the side , u have to place them far away enough to be able to see ur whole body, so try it in a room thats big enough , or living room or something. Then , you press record on both cameras , go stand on ur spot , and do all the motions you want , like hit , shoot , whatever, do all the motions you want , and then stop the cameras. Oh, btw , if you want more presicion you can use black longsleeve shirt , and black pants , and buy some ping pong balls or something similar , and jusut glue them or tape them to the key parts of the body like the motion capture suits , this will help u see better.

I'm assuming your using max , but i imagine there's a similar way to do it in any animation program. So you load max , and select the plane tool and make a plane , you know how you set up ur ref images to model from concept sketch or picture , so you set that up , but instead of loading an image , load the movie files you recorded , the front movie on the front view port and the side movie on the side view port.u then load ur bip or skeleton , and make it transparent , and position it acording to the movies. You can cycle through the frames of the movies on the viewports dont exactly remember how to do it but its easy.

If doing that is too much trouble , or ur modeling program doesnt support that feature , you can just go through the movies , and look for the key positions of the animation , and save out those frames as images , just make sure u save the same frame positions for fron and side from both movies, you can then load images on the ref image planes , and position ur bip according to the images , then load the new images on the planes , click the animation button , and reposition ur skeleton , and so on. This is the cheapest you can do, since all it requires is 2 cameras, and an animation or 3d modeling packate (which i would imagine you should already have) , and it really isnt too hard to do , i think setting up real motion capture is a more complicated process that still requires a ton of hand tweaking to be any good for games. I'ver tried this method before , and it works well.

Re: Why is Motion Capturing so expensive? [Re: Toast] #182289
02/08/08 10:24
02/08/08 10:24
Joined: Jul 2007
Posts: 424
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maslone1 Offline
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it is expensive because for detailed animation you need
expensive equipment:
- high res.camcorder maybe highspeed camcorder
- software to translate the movement into the software
- and last but not least, ... you need actors!
if you wanna have a good animation, you need good actors.

Now calculate: 1 day you have to pay shurly 9x € 80;- + other costs = € 1000; for one actor. So if you have 3 actors and 2 other people (for software and regie) you can multiplie € 1000; with 5 = 5.000;- and now with a good software like maya (and you need a pc and camcorder, and so on....) at the end you shurly have costs about € 7.500;- per week/or a day and even more!

If you write a software yourself, that can translate a video with motion-capturing points into 3dgamestudios med, and you do the animation yourself,... it will cost 1 time 3dgamestudio, one pc, one or more camcorders and your time...


A8c, Blender, FlStudio, Unity3d
Re: Why is Motion Capturing so expensive? [Re: maslone1] #182290
02/08/08 11:46
02/08/08 11:46
Joined: Jan 2003
Posts: 4,305
Damocles Offline
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Quote:

and what technology would this ultra cheap method use? i think technology isn't there yet to make something like that possible otherwise cheap motion capturing would already exist.</edit>






If the market demand would be there, like the demand for making phonecalls while walking, or
writing letters with an electronical device, the technology would be much cheaper.
In the end, all the information motion capture needs are two cameras.

THese two cameras record the movement, and the internal calculations can translate the information
to an animated bonemodel.
Its not that this is posible now, but as long as two camera-records is all information theoretical needed
a market would generate the processing software.

Re: Why is Motion Capturing so expensive? [Re: Damocles] #182291
02/08/08 11:59
02/08/08 11:59
Joined: May 2002
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ventilator Offline
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i see this a bit differently.

people would have had demand for mobile phones 50 years ago already but technology to make small, powerful and cheap radio devices wasn't ready.

Re: Why is Motion Capturing so expensive? [Re: ventilator] #182292
02/08/08 12:06
02/08/08 12:06
Joined: Jan 2003
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Damocles Offline
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Damocles  Offline
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Simply because they did not have integrated circuits, an miniature deviced.
But we have that today.

Car phones where available in the 50s, but very expensive, due to much manual
work (manual connection of calls to phonesystem), and limited range in specific towns. Back then the demand was simply limited to few
buisiness persons. The same as with MoCap.
Nowerdays its a daily good, like a TV.

MoCap on the other hand does not have the demand, as calling other persons. Thats why the prices dont fall
like on mobile phones.

Re: Why is Motion Capturing so expensive? [Re: Damocles] #182293
02/08/08 12:22
02/08/08 12:22
Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 1,093
Germany
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Toast Offline OP
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Well of course you can "fake" motion capturing by using two cameras and doing sort of a rotoscoping for each frame on your skeleton. But to my mind there still is the question as to why there is no cheap set for that which works in the same way you have seen in the video (with the needed changes I listed)...

I mean ok - nowadays a somewhat decent camera isn't as pricey as it was some years ago but the hardware for such an IR based (and I'm not speaking of expensive IR-cameras here) system isn't expensive too. It also saves you the time to copy the video to your hard-drive (assuming you use a tape camera this might take some time), adapt them so the two videos show the same time and of course actually do the animation...

This all is something that wouldn't be needed in such a mocap system - all you would need is to more or less store the positional data of each spot (which is there already as otherwise the screen on the video for example wouldn't adapt itself to the viewer's position)...

Well with that said I wondered why there isn't A SINGLE solution that doesn't cost 10000 $ and up...

Enjoy your meal
Toast

Re: Why is Motion Capturing so expensive? [Re: Toast] #182294
02/08/08 12:25
02/08/08 12:25
Joined: Jan 2003
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Damocles Offline
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As I said, its simply that the demand for MoCap is too low, to put market pressure on more effective and cheap systems.
No demand-> not extensive Research -> high prices for unique systems.

Last edited by Damocles; 02/08/08 12:27.
Re: Why is Motion Capturing so expensive? [Re: Damocles] #182295
02/08/08 13:00
02/08/08 13:00
Joined: May 2002
Posts: 7,441
ventilator Offline
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i don't see how this wii head tracking hack helps for full body motion capturing? you always have to point your head at the leds on the monitor.

...
bigger demand would maybe make development a bit faster but demand can't do magic. today image recognition hard and software still is in its infancy. automatically recognizing human body poses on video is hard. research on this isn't only done because of motion capturing but for many areas where this can be useful.

and it's not always that demand makes technology available but sometimes available technology creates demand (like with the mobile phones example). if it would have been technologically possible to create affordable mobile phones smaller than a brick then people would have run around with them in the sixties already. not just business men.

...
there is demand for cheap motion capturing. look around in 3d-animation communities. a motion capuring suit would also be useful in other areas like medicine and sports. but of course this isn't a huge market like mobile phones.

Re: Why is Motion Capturing so expensive? [Re: ventilator] #182296
02/09/08 04:06
02/09/08 04:06
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LOL @ me just repeating what Damocles had already said. But yeah , in all honesty the easiest and best method for games is hand making it from scratch , it's not too hard , and once u have have a good looping animation it can be reused over and over as well as tweaked some to make neww animations which are loopable as well.

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