.mocat in progreess
Three years ago me and my friend started to work on our very own, low cost, high quality motion capture application. Our goal was to create easy to use scalable application, that would take a video sequence, analyze it, and export a BVH motion capture file than can then be used in many 3D applications for character animation. Reason? We simply needed it for one of our projects.
We’re not crazy. We know all about EyesWeb, DeGeeMe and other applications that claim to do what we need. We know there are applications and ready to use solutions out there, but most of them require additional equipment and are very expensive, and the free just didn’t have the quality we were looking for or simply didn’t work at all.
That’s how the project “.mocat” (motion capture toolkit) was born. Fully optical (no hardware required), scalable, easy to use and semi-automated motion capture package. It took us quite a while to do some tests, and then starting to figure out equations and the right way to turn a series of 2D images into 3D coordinate system. The worse thing was that we were unable to see if the whole idea will work until we had it almost ready. Once we tested and got messed up results it was really hard to pinpoint the problem. Is it the equation, is it the input data, or maybe it’s us building BVH file the wrong way. Thankfully it did work. Just today.
We’ve assembled a greedy and not very elegant algorithm to test the data that we called “running helpers” to see if the data are represented correctly in 3D space. Now the only thing left to do is to calculate relative Euler rotations for the joints, pack the applications with a nice GUI and thats it.
Wish us luck!
Download the concept_presentation (in Polish) from 2006
This sounds absolutely fantastic.
William said this May 12th, 2008 at 22:11
It surely is. Hope we can get this done eventually. We’re not programmers. We’re problem solvers, but mostly in terms of design. We will probably need someone to take all the pieces of the prototype that we’ve created and make a solid software package out of it. Anyway this is still under development, but we’re closer to finish each day.
Maltaannon said this May 13th, 2008 at 0:50
brazilliant!!
abe said this May 30th, 2008 at 18:29
Hi Maltaannon. I realize you are super-busy. I see you all over the net. But I thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask if this .mocat project is still moving forward. I downloaded the presentation and am still in awe. Of course my reasons are selfish, as I would like to use it to generate BVH data for a character in a short film I’m working on. Anyway, keep rockin’–best wishes on MILG5 and your team-up with Avidion Media. Ciao!
William said this August 8th, 2008 at 17:54
Yes, the project is moving forward. Slowly, but it’s still in motion.
Maltaannon said this August 8th, 2008 at 21:13
That’s great to hear. Thank you for replying!
William said this August 12th, 2008 at 20:13