Sorry for no examples - the stuff I thought was crap I erased before I thought about it.
#Ipi mocap studio fixing arms software#
“I’m still having fun.I've just spent the last two days playing around with three Kinect V2 mocap software products and I thought I'd share my opinion of them. “Nope, I never get tired of it,” he says. But I’m a newcomer to the technology - it’s normal for me to be excited. Purchase agrees: “Things like standing around or just sitting down in a very basic way look more realistic, instead of just ragdoll in a chair.”Īll things considered, this feels less like work, and more like play. “When you’re standing still, you’re still using your muscles, just in ways you don’t notice.” “It also does wonders for thing like posture,” says Lean. And if something needs to be changed? It takes a half hour to fix. With the graphical style nailed down, and music already there, and animations already in, Lean knows exactly how that aspect of the game will behave when trying to fit all the puzzle pieces of game development in his head. It’s allowed things like the nightclub scene I experienced, already with myriad dancing animations, to exist in a game that only began production in March. Add in the fact that both these Kinects were bought second-hand at $50 each, and that’s some thrifty tech. Two Kinects is certainly a lot cheaper than $5k per day. “Hiring a normal motion capture studio could also run you $5,000 per day, traditionally, so it’s been a lot cheaper.” “An animator doing all those moves would have taken about 3 weeks to do,” says Lean. “But when stitched together, it looks like a complete fall.” Then I recorded me hitting the ground, which was a fall from just about this high,” indicating just a few inches. “I first recorded the jump, and then the mid-air movement. “We had a sequence in which a character was jumping out of a 4-story window,” said Purchase. The answer is, they do it piece by piece and then stitch it up together. For instance, I found myself wondering how verbose action animations would be done when movement is limited to a small square on the ground. There are ways around these limitations, though. So while I’d normally keep my guard more compact, I tried to make sure Kinect could see my right arm at all times, and they could bring my elbows in later. When it loses track of body parts, it improvises.
While facing the frontal camera, the camera on my left tracked that whole side - but there was no camera on the right, meaning it could lose track of my right arm. “The software has just detected everything as a cloud of pixels, and from there, we’re going to put that into a program where we can tweak everything.” “We had a sequence in which a character was jumping out of a 4-story window.”Īs Art Director Matt Purchase mans the driving seat, Morgan Lean explains what’s going on. I’ll also have to go a little slower than normal, as (pending a tech update), the software only captures at 30fps. After going through the calibration procedure and holding the Jesus pose, I’m told that I’ll have a small box to move around in. The motion capture room is like any normal room, just with the tables and couch pushed up against the wall. Perhaps our massive friend Chuck could provide physical motivation, instead of using his petrifying telekinesis. I do amateur boxing, so as we walked into the motion capture area, Epiphany’s founder Morgan Lean suggested we grab a few combo animations. In this pre-alpha, there wasn’t an animation for a punch yet. Noticeably, the nightclub patrons had a wide variety of animations as they danced - but when the bouncer caught up to me, I was equalised without taking a blow. It was a nightclub scene in which I was trying to escape a sizeable bouncer named Chuck. Just fire ‘er up, calibrate, and go.īefore checking out the mo-cap room, they treated me to one level of Epiphany’s upcoming game, which should be announced within the next couple of months. No need for a big studio, no need to wear special clothing with dots on it, no need to employ staff with special technical training. But hacking it for stuff like this? Way cool.Įpiphany has a room with two Kinects - one in front of you, one to the left - recording your movements so that after a short process, they can import them directly as an animation into their game. I’ve never been interested in playing a game on it.
More and more, I think the best things about the Kinect are things it was never meant to do. Using two Kinects, and some outside-the-Xbox thinking, it can motion capture far quicker and cheaper than bigger studios. Its latest tech innovation takes one of the most time consuming and costly aspects of development and turns it more into play than work. Epiphany Games is all about working smarter, not harder.
0 kommentar(er)
