setting up the system

Setting up the system today went very smoothly I think. the only little problem that we ran in to was that some of the ground was reflecting in the cameras. Also a few of the cameras where pointing down a little low and did not catch much data, luckily we found this in the setting up stage and was fixed and not let go till shooting with the actor and having to re-wand the environment half way through shooting. Also having the cameras sitting higher in the room helped with getting a better capture quality.

One of the first things you want to do in motion builder is make sure you don’t have any breaks in the markers or any added markers that are not part of the character this is called the first pass of the clean up process.

 A lot of animators will place the actor inside the markers, add the markers to the marker set, and then leave it at that, you can also tweak how the actor sits between the markers, after the marker set has been activated.  The great thing with motion builder you can make animation layers easily and make tweaks after your character rig has been imported and driven by the actor.

This is great to help solve issues like your head/neck problems, or problems with arm twist that are difficult to judge clearly from the T-pose. Fixing these small problems is faster doing in motion builder than if you were to bake out the animation and try fix it up in Maya.

motion capture setup

This little ruff drawing of how the layout of a simple motion capture  set up with the cameras.

Each black spot on this image to represent two cameras. The brown ring  is the best area for the footage to be captured inside this distance is about one meter from the cameras. The centre black dot should have the best recording data intake because it should be hitting all of the cameras.

The Ideal is to have a minimum of three cameras being able to see you at all times but to get a better result you want to have at least four cameras.

In setting up the cameras you can only have one cable connecting the cameras to the hub and from the hub to the computer you can have a maximum of two cables. This is to make sure that the footage does not lose any information during the transfers between the cables.

The hubs can have a maximum of six cameras hooked up inside them as well.