Yesterday I spent about five minutes capturing (and then a total of less than 20 minutes in iClone) creating this possibly last test (because I can't see not keeping the hardware and buying the software).  I was just fooling around trying to see how long it might take me to generate some crowd type scenes (answer -- ridiculously a small amount of time.  I was actually pretty foolish in that I kept getting up off my sofa and moving down, being a real idiot in not thinking I could just cut the clip into pieces.  Sigh -- I'm old).

I also experimented with "picking up" an object -- I will need a better focus point to do this, as I was a bit off on my second effort around the non-existent table (to be fair, when I made my second pass one of my cats decided it was a good time to visit me.  I can actually tell when she rubs against my foot, as it slips a tiny bit then.  I think I'll need to shut them out when I do critical captures).  And I'm still not doing the hands right -- when I was pantomiming picking the object up I forgot about holding the controller in my offhand correctly, so it looks a bit disjointed.  I have to get used to holding them straighter.  Also, having issues still with the Leap controller.  Sigh -- there really needs to be a countdown before it starts the capture.

Finally, I just substituted Zane in there for the second test.  In retrospect this doesn't work well, as his proportions don't match up with the android.  So the hands slip around a lot (remember -- I didn't edit ANY of the motions.  The hands appear to "slip" but in reality it's just the vase that's moving around in them.  That's the only animation that I actually did on the timeline.  But for Zane I needed to redo that animation because I don't even think his hand pivot point is the same, so when he "picks up" the vase it doesn't look nearly as convincing).

Again, very, very little time spent doing any of this.  To clean up the animation I really should take at least another 10-15 minutes but since I'm not going to use any of this for anything I don't care.

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Wow - that was a great test.
Thank you for sharing it.

I find myself thinking old thoughts, and that is about the feasibility of collaborating with other animators to work as a team.  To what extent could we have one person do motion capture for the body, another do the facial animation capture to get the expressions, another focus on the hands., a lead animator to put it all together, and a director to oversee it all.  Nobody would need to buy all the tools.  That remains a dream of mine, to attempt a project like that.  It would also include a set designer, character creation, prop modeling and texturing, lighting, music, sound effects, voices, special effects (like PopcornFX, etc.), compositing, writing, and final editing.  I've made meager attempts in the past.  Maybe it's time to try again, largely as a "test of what's possible" to start with.

But back to KT's test, I thought it was very good.  The picking up of the vase was well done.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

Thanks, Dennis.

You probably already know, but anytime you need some mocap done I'd be glad to help.  I'm not so sure I want to commit to a large project per se, but since (now) it's so much fun to do mocap of any of the three kinds (body, face and hands) I would see it as more "play" than work.

Along those same lines (sort of) what occurs to me is sharing mocap because folks move differently.  I can see myself in the movements here clearly, and while I'm an actor (sort of) and can alter my walk and movements (kind of) I doubt whether I can do a female convincingly.  So this weekend I'm going to get my wife to do some movements (watch it, guys!  No rude remarks, please :>) and see how they will differ and be used.  Luckily she's an actress (much more than I'm an actor -- she was the lead in the first musical I directed, which is how we met) and she does like doing stuff like this (so she won't take a lot of convincing, although putting on the apparatus is going to be a bit odd for her).  In any case, I could see people "trading" movements just to get some variety (and luckily these motion files are tiny, so sharing is no problem at all).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

He he .... loved your comments here Mike (about the wife and all) .... very funny.
Glad to hear she's an actress and keen to do this with you! .... :P

Edit:
....  only just noticed this is another video test - hey ---- this is great stuff Mike !!! 
Wow - such potential ! ....

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Please be patient with me ..... I don't always 'get it' the first time 'round - not even the 2nd time! :(  - yikes! ... 

● MSI GT72VR Laptop, i7 7700HQ 4-Core 3.8 GHz 16GB RAM; Nvidia 1070, 8GB Vram ● iClone-7.93 ● 3DXChange Pipeline 7.81 ● CC-3 Pipeline 3.44 ● Live Face ● HeadShot ● Brekel Pro-Body ● Popcorn FX ● iRAY ● Kinect V2 ● DaVinci Resolve17 ● Mixcraft 8.1

Thanks for the reply, Mike.

Yes, with motion capture files, I think a "team" approach is becoming more feasible since we don't need to struggle with everyone sharing a single iClone project file.

So... you are not going to strap on the harness and do your best "female" strutting around the room?  You could also video it and post it on YouTube.  I could be very funny.. But I also think I would be very concerned about not being able to unsee it.  So yeah, maybe not.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

I might mince a bit for a comic effect.  But to be a convincing female?  Not a chance (because male and femaleness is biologically determined).

The nice thing about getting my wife involved is she won't freak out when she sees me doing mocap (after she's experienced it -- so far I've only done it when she isn't home).  I might post one last test shot just to show how much difference there really is (there's a reason Andy S. gets the big bucks -- performing well for mocap is a definite art).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

The motion capture of the body itself is good. Not the hands. Not the picking of the object.  If you do another test, I would appreciate if it'd be more finished, if you can.




My latest movie THE GOLDEN MAN, and a few others: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIl1EqVCKitZzLqaNnLK0BA

As I said, I wasn't holding the controllers properly, but I'm also not going to do much more testing now, since I'm sure I'll keep it.

Picking up an object is really more a question of animating the object and not the hand animation.  You can see this clearly when I switch from the android to the human.  While in neither case is it perfect, it doesn't look at all reasonable with the human even though it's *exactly* the same motions.  The reason it doesn't is the pivot points on the hands aren't right.  To get it correct you would need to adjust that object (particularly the transfer).  I also think that it's possible to get a better "transfer" by doing the old "duplicate the object" trick (where you have one object that sits there and as you transfer control you just hide/unhide the dupes accordingly).  But while I may experiment with that myself it's not really the point of these tests (which were to convince me whether I wanted to keep the hardware and buy the software).

The thing about all of these tests (all three of them) that's the weakest is the fingers -- I'm still having a tough time getting the Leap controller to work with LIVE well.  The biggest issue is it takes time to "setup" so no matter what you do there is a bit of roughness when you first start out.  I suppose that might be possible to edit out but I haven't looked at that at all.  Ideally you'd record some motion with a lead in time (actually, ideally RL would have written the software correctly to have a countdown so you can set it up properly).  Now, the fingers would have added a lot to the object pickup (assuming I could have gotten them right).  I almost think it would have been better just to use static positions -- that's another problem with the LIVE Leap -- you get to thinking you should use it when most of the time you really don't need finger "movement" per se.

I *might* do one more test that has all of it -- the body, the fingers (sigh) and the Faceware.  That's the main reason I didn't use a human in the first two tests or most of the third, because facial expression is also needed to be convincing.  But while I have the time to do it I have no particular inspiration (perhaps I'll think of something tomorrow -- I just came home from tennis and am pretty tired).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Hey KT, how much did you spend on the hardware? Cause looking at your tests i get a very bad case of: Gimme gimme gimme i want i want i neeeeeeed thiiiisss!

I 'suffer' from the same ailment as Raxel ... lol
But in my case the ailment will simply have to go away, because this set-up is not possible for me (financially speaking).
There's *so much* that could be achieved with this .... and so much 'faster'....
Why you could get a serious amount of acting done in a single 'session' - potentially an 'entire' short 'episode' of a series.
All you need now Mike is 'large man cave' for a studio! :)


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Please be patient with me ..... I don't always 'get it' the first time 'round - not even the 2nd time! :(  - yikes! ... 

● MSI GT72VR Laptop, i7 7700HQ 4-Core 3.8 GHz 16GB RAM; Nvidia 1070, 8GB Vram ● iClone-7.93 ● 3DXChange Pipeline 7.81 ● CC-3 Pipeline 3.44 ● Live Face ● HeadShot ● Brekel Pro-Body ● Popcorn FX ● iRAY ● Kinect V2 ● DaVinci Resolve17 ● Mixcraft 8.1