Motion Capture from video file

#1

Hi everyone!

I am looking for an application that would help me extract motion capture data from a videofile. So a software only solution that can work with video files.

I’m using Cinema4D for 3D work and I’m mainly working on a Mac, but I do have a PC as well.

I seem to only find tools to work with Mocap data, but not actually extracting mocap data from a videofile.

I’d be very grateful for any help.

Marco von Moos
NoControl Cinema
http://www.nccinema.ch

#2

Ive never heard of such a program. you sure it exists?

#3

me too:rolleyes:adn i dont think exist…

#4

I don’t think you’ll find software to do this trick… you’ll need to do it yourself…

  1. It would be nice to have multiple videofiles (multiple angels), otherwise you only have 2D information…?! :slight_smile:
  2. In Max I would do it as next; (if there are dots on important points of the body);
  • track that points
  • ‘pin’ them to 2D
  • track those dots from another angle… (side if the other one was front, for example)
  • ‘pin’ them also to an object to move in 2D
  • make a dummy that uses the X-movement of the óne pinned-object, and the YZ-movement from the other (for example)
  • now you have made óne dummy move (in 3D) as in the videofile…

If you have allot dots, it will be costing allot coffee ( :wink: ), but its fairly easy and cheap :slight_smile:

Now you just need to find out how to do it in Cinema 4D :slight_smile:

Good luck, and let me / use hear how it went… (I just ‘made’ that theory; never tested it :shrug: ),
Gijs

[wholy-sh*t :wink: , you are that great guy of that website with that awesome VFX-tutorials! :thumbsup: …! Your Matrix-move tutorial meant allot to me! Awesome work you got! :slight_smile: ]

#5

Oh all yee of little faith!

There is a software program that can take information from a video file, and extract 3D data from it…they use it to track cricket balls for the 3rd umpire (video umpire, for the yanks :slight_smile: ).

There is also some motion capture software for capturing facial animation…i know there were a few students at WITS UNIVERSITY in South Africa that were developing it. They had a company…hybrid something. Ill take a look around my old harddrive and see what I can dig up.

#6

I am looking for a program like that myself right now for a project I’m working on…

I have found a few.

DMAS6, Digital Motion anayisis System. The porgram seem to be great but they don’t list the pricing info so I am afraid its going to cost an arm and a leg.
http://www.spicatek.com/m_content.htm

C-Motion’s VZAnalyzer may do the trick. You can apparently ask for a 30 day demo…
http://www.c-motion.com/

And finally Simi has a version of this type pf program, Simi Motion.
http://www.simi.com/en/products/motion/index.html

If anyone know of any other programs, Post them…

#7

http://www.geeware.com/ - time consuming as you manually keyframe each dot on every frame…

oops… that’s out of date website… probably sold out to the highest bidder like visual marker’s maker did? http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:-xIR0WMuYQgJ:www.geeware.com/+&hl=en

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2004-32%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=DGeeMe+

visual marker is a little better but not much… still a manual process…

there’s other solutions out there… One such solution is to use aura’s (2 or higher) (now under a different name and company’s ownership than Newtek) pixel tracking function and export the tracked motion as a motion file in to lightwave, attach a null to each dot’s location after moving stuff around in graph editor so each track matches one null and then use those nulls to guide the bones.

#8

http://www.realviz.com/products/mpro/index.php

http://www.realviz.com/products/mpro/motion_capture.php

there u go

#9

the technique to capture motion from a video is called Optical Flow still its very dificult to obtain good results, it what the esc team use to move the 3d models of the heads of neo and smith, pftrack is a program that have optical flow

#10

just rotoscope it.

done.

#11

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