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Better Support for Mocap (real time and BVH)

clevenger

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Nov 25, 2020
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I've been playing with a mocap suit lately and it produces some animations that work real well in VAM....up to a point.

The suit generates BVH files with a full skeleton including fingers, but since VAM doesn't use joints for fingers the hands don't work.

Also the suit can real-time stream BVH files so you could animate a VAM character live, if there was support for it. I'm trying to work out how hard this would be to write a plugin for. I haven't ever written a program for Unity or VAM so it would be a big learning curve for me...but maybe not for someone else.

In any case, these full-body mocap setups are dropping in price rapidly, I've seen a commercial one for $1500 (cheaper than a VIVE rig) and a DIY one for as little as $800. There are also several face capture systems that are free or run on phones. So it would be really great to support these things in VAM.

The suit I'm using now has a bunch of Unity .cs scripts for reading live mocap data, so the main part is knowing how to connect the data to VAM.

Anyway, I think native support for mocap suits in VAM would be a good idea, particularly the way prices are going down.

If anyone wants to experiment with this I can provide pointers to the manufacturer's docs, sample files and stream mocap data (my setup can stream over the internet).
 
You might also want to look at wrnch.ai they do full body mocap with an iphone app, the quality is ok till you turn sideways. They also have a PC capture system that works with multiple webcams.
 
i find a method can mocap cheap.,its use iphone x to capture face emotion,(two hand onsale 80 dollar),,and oculus quest2 mocap upbody motions,(two hand onsale 100 dollar
 
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