Motion Capture Meeting

Following on from the Motion Capture demonstration last Friday, today I had a meeting with Vijay John and Manuel Trucco about a possible collaboration using their system. As their system is a marker-less one they talked me through the details of how the system works and possible limitations. I won't go into the details here but I find it quite interesting that the system uses silhouettes as part of the process of recognising a persons motion.

In terms of what they are looking for from me is to be able to take their captured data and visualise it in a clearer and prettier way than they can at the moment. This means that I must be able to effectively work with motion capture data, be able to apply this motion to other skeletons and models and be able to visualise this in an aesthetically pleasing way.

The first part of this process will be to learn how to use Motion Builder as a way of importing and working with the captured data for clean-up, organisation and application to other skeletons. I will also need to develop a good pipeline for dealing with the data in relation to working with both Motion Builder and Maya. Digital Tutors has some info on working with motion capture data so I will start there first. Vijay has also given me a link to the
Carnegie Mellon University Motion Capture Database. This is an extensive data set that covers a huge range of movements and will be a good place to get data to be able to practice with.

Also in on the meeting was Tricia Anderson who I will collaborate with when on the main project using the motion capture system. Tricia is a choreographer and is very interested in the relationship between dance and animation. Using the motion capture system as a bridge between a dancers real life performance and the animators ability to enhance motion capture data together we should be able to create something quite exciting.