Hi everyone,
Does anyone know of an alternate mocap animation programs besides motionbuilder. i’m asking because i remember seeing an article in game developers magazine about a new mocap program that also does muscle deformation and other stuff like that. it featured some football game using it. i can’t find the issue that talks about the program and can’t remember the name of it. anyone might have an idea on what the program was called?
thanks.
leonard
I think what you’re looking for is Endorphin… Which actually isn’t a mocap editing program exactly. you take mocap or hand keyed animation and import it into this program… well, i’ll let you read about it.
you’ll see the football demos on the website.
http://www.naturalmotion.com/pages/products.htm
I havn’t heard of another mocap editing software that is anything like motionbuilder. Good luck finding one better. Most studios that don’t use motionbuilder figure out how to put mocap onto rigs in the major 3d packages / max/ maya / xsi etc…
-Darrell
Darrell,
Thanks, this was the program I was talking about. I thought EA might have been using it for something, but it doesn’t mention that on the site. I remember in the game developer article that it mentioned something about some next gen games using it. That’s all I remember so I was curious about it.
Leonard Washington
Giant Studios has its own software called Nuance for motion editing, but unfortunatly you can’t buy it. You have to license it for a particular project. We use it at Animal Logic, and Weta Digital uses it along with MotionBuilder. Its a great tool.
If you can get your hands on a copy, Mirai has motion editing features. http://www.izware.com/mirai/
New software from House of Moves.
Endorphin is awesome. I have eval’d it for a number of project and while the results it gave were great, we didn’t really need the simulation stuff as the mocap we had worked as is. But if you need to character to, say… run out in to the street and get hit by a bus, it’s perfect, as it’s much easier to use this software that to mocap a bus hitting a stuntman. 
IQ is pretty good, but don’t have great IO for working with skeletons and is mostly designed to work with a Vicon system. It’s quite different from Motion builder. It’s editing features are mainly tailored to the mocap data itself, and not the skeleton animation. Diva has a little better IO and some nice features, but once again is mainly tailored to editing marker trajectories. I’ve used IQ in production (Catwoman and Barnyard) but I have only evaluated Diva, not used it in production so I don’t know too much about it. It will be interesting to see what Vicon come up with when they mix iq and diva together.
Al
These days I try and avoid using motion builder where possible. It’s fast and easy to use, but it can really stomp on the data and they have not added any new features for mocap since the actor/character tool was first introduced. It’s good for non human looking characters; we used it lots on barnyard, but for human characters I try to use a global optimization solve rather than an IK based solver these days. I used IQ to solve halle berry in catwoman and although the spine didn’t turn out as well as I would have liked, I was really happy with the results. Diva and IQ have GO solvers, and Motion Analysis and Giant have software to do GO solves I think too. I’m working on my own one for maya now.
Al.
Hah, thats funny, because most of the work I do with motionbuilder, I WANT to stomp on the data. However, I work in video games, and we need to make the motion NOT look like mocap if you get what I mean. I use it mainly for Layering motion. Which maya cannot do very easily.
When I need to get straight data from a capture that needs minimal editing where we’re not destroying stuff, we Process it with IQ then send it straight to maya and put it all on a rig.
We’ve actually recently tried your Peel software to compare it to what we’ve made. Looks promising. Good luck with it.
P.S. we’re hiring mocap specialists ( Leads, Shooters, Trackers/Solvers etc ) Brand new Vicon system in house. Message me if you fit this position.
-Darrell
Hah, thats funny, because most of the work I do with motionbuilder, I WANT to stomp on the data. However, I work in video games, and we need to make the motion NOT look like mocap if you get what I mean. I use it mainly for Layering motion. Which maya cannot do very easily.
It’s been a while since I worked in games… but I don’t really know why you would want to stomp on the data and have it “not look like mocap”. Why are you using mocap if you don’t want it to look like mocap - why not keyframe or roto animate to the mocap?
From my [little] experience in the games industry, the worst stomp on the data comes from curve fitting compression on euler f-curves, which is just wrong for so many reasons. In that case then yeah, you’ll need to stomp all over the data to avoid parkinsons or other artifacts.
Yup, layering can’t be done very easily, but there are ways to do it (without using the trax editor).
When I need to get straight data from a capture that needs minimal editing where we’re not destroying stuff, we Process it with IQ then send it straight to maya and put it all on a rig.
Do you export the skeleton data as a V-file and apply to the rig? If so how did you get around the z-up problems and rotation order? Or if you export at trajectory data, how do you get it on the rig?
We’ve actually recently tried your Peel software to compare it to what we’ve made. Looks promising. Good luck with it.
Thanks… let me know if there is anything I can do to help. Wanna buy a copy?
P.S. we’re hiring mocap specialists ( Leads, Shooters, Trackers/Solvers etc ) Brand new Vicon system in house. Message me if you fit this position.
I used to live up the road from you… I was living in Laguna Beach and working in San Clemente on barnyard. I’m working at the Film School in Vancouver now taking a break from production. I’ll drop you a message if things change and I get the production itch calling me.
Darrell,
How big is the mocap department currently and how large is the mocap studio?
Leonard Washington.
There is a recent entry in the Mocap field - REALVIZ Movimento.
http://sfx.realviz.com/products/mvm/index.php?language=EN
There is also the long standing and somewhat questionable - CREDO INTERACTIVE Life forms.
http://www.charactermotion.com/products/lifeforms/index.html
Hummmm…interesting…I don’t see anywhere on their website to purchase REALVIZ Movimento. Perhaps its not available for purchase yet? Anyone able to get a quote for this product?
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