Project 3: Motion Capture – Kenzie and Taliyah

Our process:

The first step in creating an animated mannequin was recording. Kenzie wanted to test the mannequin doing a cartwheel.

Here’s the video we ended up using to capture the motion:

IMG_1248

We uploaded the video to Rokoko to create a file of a mannequin doing the cartwheel and dance moves. We took the fbx file that gave us and imported it into Blender because we wanted to try and edit the mannequin file itself. We were able to edit the file and add a hat however we were unable to make the hat move with the mannequin and follow the motion. We tried to work with a few different people in the XR studio to figure this out but no one was able to figure out why it wasn’t working so we eventually settled for leaving the mannequin how it was.

Here’s a screen recording of the motion captured by Rokoko after uploaded it into Blender:

Screen Recording 2023-10-27 at 12.59.00 PM

Because we didn’t us the actual motion capture suit in the studio, the motion is a little bit glitchy and it didn’t handle sudden movements very well. Here’s a video of the provided mannequin file doing the default cartwheel animation from Mixamo. You can see that the movement is much smoother because it wasn’t working off of a video.

Screen Recording 2023-10-27 at 1.10.52 PM

 

Reflection:

Motion capture isn’t really something that we’ve been interested in before or really thought about the logistics of. The most I’ve thought about it was seeing those videos of “Marvel behind the scenes” where the actors are wearing funny looking suits. It’s really cool to see the behind the scenes of what goes into capturing the motion and how much processing has to go on even after you have the motion. It also makes me appreciate the sophistication of the suits and how fluidly they’re able to capture movement.