I believe it's still in development, and I have no idea how affordable (or not) it will be, but it's pretty amazing...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwsTo4LQoGg&feature=feedf

This would have been unspeakably cool--four short years ago.

At this point, unfortunately, isn't it going to get crushed down into roadkill by Kinect?

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I think doing motions yourself in front of a kinect sensor would
be faster. Wow, this is exciting stuff1

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I think many people are going to find that the motion capture with kinect is going to be sloppy, and extremely sluggish, will require a whole lot of clean up, and be lacking in detail.  It will require a dedicated space, and who know what else will interfere with the motion capture, such as lighting, background, etc.  I hold very little faith in using Kinect, it is a Microsoft product after all. 

I hope this QUMA thing works out, I hope it comes to market quickly, and is affordable.

Hmm... I think this is a nice hibrid between keying animation and motion capture... For example, I'm fine with keying some major animation poses, but sometimes posing can be a problem, so this would be really useful... Does it need a camera? If not, I don't see why it'd be more expensive. I think this would be really useful and really speed things up for an animator who doesn't use motioncapture. THe only thing you'd have to do or remember is that every movement is local, so you would still have to key the character going somewhere.

Also if you did something like had the character sit, I'm not sure how that would work with pinning the feet to the floor.

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I think you will be surprised wizaerd. I've had no issues with the ipisoft version and have used it quite frequently. Its looks like the iClone open source version might be even better.

I experienced none of the issues you mention other than using the software to do it own cleanup which consisted of pushing a few buttons after choosing the level of smoothing. Plus its all done in a very small space. I was pleasantly surprised at the results. It paid for itself in the first job it was used for and no complaints about the animation to this point.

Being a Microsoft product made the installation to pc flawless and quick and I'm able to do the mocap in the small space in front of my desk. No sword fights though!



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The QUMA solution, I suppose, would be useful for really complicated and detailed poses, but getting into and out of those poses would require a lot of manual keyframing, so I suppose if the Kinect created good animations, it won't be a horrible solution.  I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

QUMA looks cool. A nice concept.

Article on QUMA here for those that don't know about it.

The kinect mocap from ipisoft can be smoothed out too much which does remove some of the movement so it's far from perfect and I didn't mean to leave that impression as it does have it's own quirks and users will get different results but I was surprised at how good it was.

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I've never used iPi with Kinect, but Brekel. Brekel has no smoothing filters, but it's using the same open source drivers as RL will use.

So:
It's really cheap
Driver installation is no problem
on fast PC, capturing works great
Configuration is done in seconds (you should tell how deep the Kinect will look)
Calibration needs seconds also

what is not so good:
The drivers have no support for 2 people at once (rughly they have, but Brekel never used them, with RL it might be the same)
The Kinect can't see through anyone, so what you are doing on your back is something the software has to guess.

These are the most disatvantages I think.
The last thing isn't a great problem I think, as you could capture from the same angle as you will use in iClone

and the first big problem might be solveable with a better interaction RL will introduce in iClone. Eg two people kissing each other.



So, afterall, the puppy from the first post might be great fun to use, and there are some poses you will not be able to get with Kinect. Eg laying down on the floor, or making a breakdance (never tried, but I think so ;-) ). But appart from these examples, Kinect might really be enough.



Oh, I've forgotten one thing:
No hand movements. But this could change.

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