Optical motion capture

Christopher Vaughan

This is a proof of concept of a under $1000 optical motion capture rig that I built. I used two cameras and a motion tracker to provide the data to Maya, I then interpreted the tracking points along the surface of the 3d skin. There are no skin weights on the model.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10151089085913198&l=9206771785741735801

Tom Stewart

Wow! You should do a class on this!

Christopher Vaughan

thanks!

David Boccabella

Really Good.  Why 2 camera's though.

Christopher Vaughan

from my blog:  http://polymathicthinker.blogspot.com/2012/08/photogrammetry.html

Jan Mulders

This is really interesting; I'd definitely like to see more about how you went about doing point tracking and actually mashing the data into Maya.

Christopher Vaughan

Thanks! The point tracking was done with syntheye for post tracking (much more accurate) and simplecv for realtime rehearsal tracking and since simple CV is written in python it was no problem to port it to pymel. 

The tracking points produced null locator data that I used and an algorithm (several actually)  written in mel to take that locator movement and parent it to bone (that i could adjust on a granular animation level). The Bones are point constrained to the surface with follicles from the hair system. and voila..