can max 5 deal with mocap data without outside software? please help

[EricChadwick]

The dummies are usable as bones. Not sure if there are any problems with getting feet to stick, that kind of thing. One problem is that bones can keep their length automatically, whereas dummies need extra setup magic in order to do the same.

When I used mocap it was a few years ago, and we used Character Studio. Worked OK, was a breeze to import. But calibrating the character skel to the actor was a pain. We got a lot of drift over time, away from the calibrated offsets. Though they may have improved that, dunno. CS does allow easy feet locking, very helpful. Also now has a better motion mixer, tho haven't tried it myself.

[jum'bok]

thanks for the quick reply posm =) the stretchiness of the helpers was definitely one of the things that made me think it would be impossible to do any major tweaking to the data ( though maybe people just use the track editor when masaging mocap data, i have no idea. :shrug: )

can you tell me any more about what kind of extra setup magic helper objects need in order to act like bones? maybe i need to at least get my hands on a copy of character studio... i requested a cs license from work over two months ago, and i STILL haven't gotten it :rolleyes:

[Ls3D]

First off tell your employers you can not do it properly without CS or MotionBuilder, but you will gladly play R&D guy waisting another week...

The only thing I can think of (without proper tools) would be to build your own bones rig and link the IK goals to the dummies that are the mocap points. I don't think you will get the right rotation data this way, just some floaty points that you may be able to clean up if you are very patient and free to spend a lot of time on.

I hope others have better news.

-Shea
www.Ls3D.com

:cool:

[EricChadwick]

Sorry, I don't have the answer. Just thinking along the lines of how there are many ways to skin a cat in max, you could probably constrain the dummies, somehow. But then again it probably wouldn't be pretty, or easily editable. Adjusting the motion curves would be a mess too.

We did do some maxscript foolery to get data from a hockey stick the actor was using, to rotate a bone to match three dummies containing mocap position data. But it was still a pain, and we ended up tossing the data anyway, keyframing most of it.

Ls3D has it right. Spend the money on someone's time (and get a messy pipeline... no disrespect intended), or spend the money on a proper tool.

[jum'bok]

i'll be the first to admit that this project is going nowhere fast, no offense taken :beer:

i totally agree with you guys, it's just been hard for me to suggest buying new software before now because i'm a modeler who's new to all this animation stuff, and didn't even know for sure what would help.

ok so i just got an email from kaydara with the motionbuilder for $200 usd offer, seems like a pretty good deal since they usually charge a grand for it and cs is 1000 dollars as well.

multiple licenses of character studio are supposedly in the works here, but who knows when they will come and i'm wondering if it might just be worth 200 dollars of my own hard earned money to buy a lifetime license of motionbuilder 5 (not the professional version)

any thoughts on this? it's expensive for a poor college student, but it's cheap for cg software.

i'm going to go watch the demo on their webpage now.

[EricChadwick]

I would only buy software for company use on my own dime if my job security was on flimsy ground.

I haven't tried MotionBuilder. I'd suggest getting some advice from users. A good place is the Discreet board... lots of experienced folks there, including animators who know these tools.

[jum'bok]

yeah i just meant for my personal use, so i can at least learn how to do this stuff.

i'm trying to light a fire under them for the cs licenses, so we'll see what happens.

it's so frustrating trying to get something done when there are too many variables. we're trying to ultimately get motion capture data into the panda 3d engine, which nobody has done yet, when i didn't know how to animate really, or how to apply motion capture data, or what software is essential to do so. :banghead:

thanks for the tips, i feel a bit more informed now.

by the way, as far as character studio in particular goes, how complicated is it to add the acclaim data to bones or a biped? it seems like motionbuilder would make that pretty easy with its animation retargeting.

like i said i'm really feeling unimformed about all this and i want to have some idea what i'm talking about before i start trying to advocate for new software.

thanks guys.

jum:thumbsup:

[EricChadwick]

They have a movie on the Discreet site that shows how the mocap import process works with CS. Worth a look.

http://www.discreet.com/products/cs/

[jum'bok]

i actually just found those a few minutes ago, i'm downloading now, thanks! :)

[markdc]

Keep in mind that motionbuilder 5 std doesn't support all mocap formats that you find in 4 pe. - .trc is no longer supported for example (you need the professional version).

[jum'bok]

ok, so after watching all the videos and reading up on kaydara.com, I have a little more concrete info. Thanks for the tip brian_dlm, I downloaded the motionbuilder demo and made note of the formats it can deal with.

Now that I've seen the video for Character Studio that posm was kind enough to point out, I realize I have more of a problem than I thought-- I don't know how to get the Acclaim data into a form that CS will open. They don't exactly import a wide array of file formats, do they? :annoyed:

I found a $600 dollar add-on to Deep Exploration that will convert a .c3d to a .csm, but I swear there has to be a converter or script or something out there that will do the same thing. Anybody have experience with a less expensive way to get .amc or .c3d data into Character Studio?

So these are the two pipelines that seem possible so far, although I just found out that we've already paid for CS licenses which just haven't been activated yet, so I suppose asking them to get me a copy of Motionbuilder as well might be hard.

Either way though, feel free to comment:

http://www.neuroticana.com/images/pipemocap1.gif

http://www.neuroticana.com/images/pipemocap2.gif

If nobody has any ideas how to get around buying the extra Deep Exploration module, I can always try discreet tech support, but from their site it looks like you even have to have to buy a subscription to that.

Keep the advice coming please! You guys are great.

jum:buttrock:

[Ls3D]

Wow, you really are up a creek,...

Perhaps you should start a new thread titled; HELP - need C3D data converted to CSM or BVH... and look for other places to post as well. Does Deep Exploration have a fourm? Would their sales dept. be willing to convert a single file for you in hopes of a sale? Or give you the name of a user you could beg for help?

I realize these are desparate measures, but hey you never know..

Also, regarding this panda engine,.. do you have a workflow in mind? Are you going with ASCII or have a workable solution?
I noticed in your post you said nobody has done this before.

And finally, CS has a fairly steep learning curve, so if you are going to massage the mocap data (sticking feet and such) just be aware that you may not sleep for a few days, or hire a consultant to bring you up to speed.

Good luck,

-Shea
www.Ls3D.com

:cool:

[EricChadwick]

Yeah, ask around. Someone might want to help, or already have a converter.

Is the Acclaim file an ASCII one? You might be able to quickly convert to something CS can read, just by shifting the data around. Might be real easy for someone with minimal database experience.

I know there are converters around for various formats, or at least there used to be. Maybe search these sites...
http://www.maxplugins.de/ (v3, v4 and v5)
http://www.scriptspot.com/start.htm
http://tdp.nu/index.shtml

BTW, found this old tutorial for CS v2. Might not help much with the new versions though.
http://64.226.87.40/Tutorials/CStudioMocap/index.htm

Good luck man. I know how painful it can be.

[jum'bok]

c3d_to_csm.exe (http://www.3d4reel.com/uci/mocap/c_video_lessons/c3d_to_csm.exe):surprised

oh man check this out- i was really dissapointed when it turned out to not be an app itself, but it is a video showing someone using the exact file i need. i can't find it anywhere, but we've emailed the guy whose webpage it's on, so hopefully he'll respond soon (he's on the west coast so let's hope he's not a late sleeper too)

@Ls3D: panda (http://www.etc.cmu.edu/panda3d/) is still pretty new, disney used it for toontown online, if you're familiar with that. now a group here is helping disney vr studio develop it further, so it's sortof a quasi-in-house thing. disney used maya and lightwave or something for their workflow before, so this summer we've been trying to get a pipeline through max working. one of the programmers here wrote an exporter from max that works on ik models, so we're hoping that will do the trick for cs as well. i know just exporting raw data from a max file isn't as robust as dealing with cs skeletons and animation files, but it's a start at least.

like you say, it will take some time to learn cs, and i think i need to do that before i can suggest further changes to the importer, etc. luckily we're not under a huge time crunch with this, but yeah i will have to probably spend a few nights ignoring my studies and give myself a crash course in cs. i hate being a student! learning new software on the job on a deadline is practice for the real world i'm sure, but damn i need more hours in the day.

@posm: after having relatively little success looking for an importer to cs or a converter (thanks for the links btw), i went back to vicon and looked for exporters for their capturing and refining software. was actually pretty easy to find an exporter to .csm, but i'll have to check with the folks at the lab to see if it will work and if they're willing to convert things for us.

however the motion capture lab here already has lots of cool free data (http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/search.html) that they make available as part of a research grant. Since capture time is hard to come by, we might be stuck with stock data for awhile, which is why we're still interested in a converter.

we are going to try and get the lab to convert those captures to csm format if the converter i found works with their software, or at least start releasing csm files from this point on. since they're primarily using maya, i assume they just don't realze they're excluding max users with the formats they have up there now.

as far as writing a converter, we're looking into that as well. as i understand the acclaim formats they are binary, but we have found a converter to ascii. from what i've read, the hard part would be the way the data is recorded. i believe csm has actual tracker euler data for each marker position and rotation. c3d seems to only record euler data for the root bone, and then relative positon and rotation from that bone for all the rest of the trackers/bones. so it almost seems like a question of loading the c3d, playing the motion and recapturing it as a csm.

it seems like we might be able to import c3d into max and then use martin breidt's (http://www.breidt.net/scripts/index.html) writecsm script to export a working csm, but that's only hypothetical at this point. i need to actually try it once i have my mitts on cs. if the c3d to csm converter we saw in that video turns out to be a dead end, there's a programmer here who says he thinks he'd able to write it, it's just a question of finding the time.

speaking of which, i'm late for class argh.

thanks for sticking with this thread you two, it's helped a lot to have a sounding board.

if experience really is what you get when you don't get what you want, i'm getting lots of experience this week

jum:p

[jum'bok]

hey i've gotten a couple of pm about this thread, from people having similar problems who wanted to be informed of the solution if i ever found one.

just wanted to mention that one of the phd computer science students here, a guy by the name of sauce, has been so kind to learn maxscript and write a .c3d to .csm converter. it still has a few kinks to be worked out, but once it's finished he plans on releasing it. i'll be sure to post here or in the maxscript forum once it's ready.

:applause:

[Cyberdigitus]

you might also look into kaydara's Human Ik, wich is like motionbuilder's rig and motion capture support right into max, not sure but i guess it's a lot cheaper then character studio

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