Getting Ready for the First Production Mocap Session and Some Motion Capture Examples

Posted in Production on 16 February 2017
  1. Blog
    2. »
  2. Production
    3. » Getting Ready for the First Production Mocap Session and Some Motion Capture Examples

I've been quite busy playing with the Perception Neuron 32-sensor Motion Capture kit recently. Long story short, it's an amazing affordable inertial full-body MoCap solution which can produce seriously impressive captures (some amateur examples below). By affordable I mean really affordable, since the only rival that comes to mind is the Xsens MVN suit which has a starting price of about $12,000. You can now clearly understand why I was so excited to receive my very own complete inertial MoCap suit for a fraction of the price of Xsens.

perception neuron 32 mocap kit

I received it about a week ago (not long after I reviewed the 6-neuron Lite kit) and still can't stop wondering how NOITOM team were able to achieve such level of performance with such democratic pricing.

perception neuron 32 mocap kit

The kit comes with everything you'll need to start capturing right away (apart from a 2-amp USB powerbank you will need to do captures over WiFi).

perception neuron 32 mocap kit

Everything is neatly packed and grouped by the body part. Cool thing is that this is a universal MoCap system. That is, you can only equip certain parts and connect them to the hub and capture, in case you don't need the data from all 32 neurons.

perception neuron 32 mocap kit The magnificent neurons

I've also found out that the neurons' cases (not storage cases, actual sensors) are made of aluminum, so they are very sturdy which helps, since you need to pop them in and out every time you put on the suit and take it off respectively.

perception neuron 32 mocap suit Does anyone else get the "Minority report" vibe?

I believe the gloves are the highlight of the system:

perception neuron 32 mocap gloves Perception Neuron MoCap gloves

Being able to capture hands is really something! Imagine animating all those digits frame by frame! Granted, captured data is not production-ready off the bat, but it's stable enough you can get to cleaning right away and save tens, no, hundreds of hours on animation!

This saturday I will be doing my very first motion capture session. To satisfy your curiosity while I record and edit the MoCap session video, I quickly put together a couple of short clips I produced while testing the kit.

In the video:

  1. The very first attempts at capturing and re-targeting raw motion capture data (hence shaky) without any filtering whatsoever.
  2. Demonstration of how full-body capture with hands and fingers can help tell a story in real-time.
  3. Finished re-targeting rig and a nuanced finger capture. One-click filtering only.
  4. Just some random rendered scene.

Note: one of those will probably end up as a very short animation I will do before the main 8-minute film to practice every aspect of a feature production. Try to guess which one it is. =)

Well done, NOITOM, really, really well done... Thank you for making top-quality affordable MoCap available for the masses!

happy perception neuron awesome face

Thank you for reading and stay tuned for more MoCap related posts.

Production