Motion capture

[denee]

I have a client who want to equip his club with mocap.
He wants to capture motion from dancer and apply it in realtime to 3d character. Anybody have experience with such a things? Please advise what to read, how much it costs, what technology is better?

[sleepytom]

its very expensive - he would be better of just making the dancing 3d clips and then getting that dancers to do the same moves - you end up with basicly the same thing but for a fraction of the price.

[denee]

Seems to be that price isnt problem. I said him that it will cost at least more than 10k bucks and he wasnt surprised. Big fish.

[johnnylocust]

I think you misunderstood what Tom said. It's VERY expensive. Wikipedea has a good article on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_capture. Some studios have stock motion data available for a fraction of the cost (www.moves.com comes to mind). There are much more inexpensive solutions, but most don't provide data in realtime, and are very inacurate.

[deepvisual]

you'd be surprised....

earlier this year I saw the guy who invented isadora doing basic motion capture with two laptops and some IR cameras.
he was tracking dancers in the dark and projecting their shapes back onto them in real time.
kit wise it must have cost around ?3000 max

how he did it is another story but it can be done.

[johnnylocust]

EyesWeb can do some simple motion capture based on CV principles. It also outputs OSC which isadora has native support for. It won't however do 3D capture, just estimations of body positions on a 2-D plane.

[sleepytom]

Mark Coniglio is a genius but i don't think even he is doing "real" 3d mocap on a budget (yet) you can see how he does his current thing at http://www.troikaranch.org/technology.html

and the existing realtime decent resolution 3d systems are very expensive (as in hollywood say they are expensive - your $10k budget might get you a single days hire!)

[denee]

Thanks for replies guys!
So only 2d keying is possible with a budget $10-50k?
Could you please explain, what for using that things with IR cams instead of chroma keying?

[johnnylocust]

The erratic lighting in a club environment would baffle EyesWeb. It's CV (Computer Vision) algorithms operate on luma only (if I recall correctly). IR cameras and lighting aren't effected, so it's more accurate.

[denee]

understood
... and if it real tracking, there are possibilities to attach cool effects to that points, - such a particle emitters, etc