Cinema Mo Cap [Released]

Hi guys,
Was reading your forums on your website and saw that the documentation was update to v1.1 but haven't seen 1.1 in my import link in unity asset store. Is there an update available, I may have read that wrong so I am just asking.

 

Hi guys,

I have a question: Mocap is able to manage and record a humanoid arms-less or a non humanoid (monster creatures, etc). Can I manage that in some way?
Thanks

-Kafar

 

Hiya!

We've submitted it to the asset store on Wednesday, and are still waiting for it to be posted. Stay tuned!

 

Hi,

Thank you for this first tutorial : clear and funny.
We are waiting for new one...

Last documentation is available here :
http://www.cinema-suite.com/Documentation/CinemaMoCap/Current/CinemaMoCapDocumentation.pdf

 

Hi,

Maybe my post above has been missed...

-Kafar

 

We are working on options to let you pick a body mask. For example you could choose to record only the upper body / arms or whatever.

It could potentially work for you now, depending on how your arm-less monster is made. Can the Animation Type of your monter's rig be set to Humanoid in Mecanim?

 

Yes I can, my character has his arms and two wheels instead of legs.

 

You Should be set then Kafar. If you haven't purchased Cinema Mo Cap - email us at support@cinema-suite.com and I can send you over a sample animation that you can try with your rig.

Cheers,

Dan

 

I purchased Cinema Mo Cap but I need to understand can how set in your tool this particular case.
Thanks

 

Kafar,

Please watch our tutorial to get started, if you are having problems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-aoCBCBK-Q

Email us - support@cinema-suite.com if you require further assistance after watching.

Thank you,

Dan

 

Is dual kinect support a sure thing? If so I'll buy now.

 

Your product looks amazing! I especially want to congratulate you on the excellent tutorials you have made. I spent days looking for a tutorial on tweaking mocap files on Blender and found nothing comparable to yours. Thank you!

I do have a question. We are seriously considering buying a Kinect and your software. I know that the Xbox 360 sensor works as well as the Windows Kinect sensor but is there any advantage to either one? Is set up as easy on the Windows Kinect Sensor as on the one for Xbox? I have searched for information but have found little comparing the two for animation creation.

My two teens have been assigned movie production by their art tutor and this looks like a perfect way for them to do simple animations. I have tried sitting them down with Blender, but the learning curves are steep. I think this would be fun for them as well as encourage them two learn to use the software to refine their original animations. It doesn't hurt that we can also make animations for our game.

Thanks again!

 

Hey there Outspoken. We cannot make guarantees, but we are working hard on dual kinect support. It is very large task and we continue to explore all possibility for multiple Kinect support. I hope this helps! That being said, for the price-point of the product at this point, we still feel you can achieve a lot with one Kinect.

Cheers,

Dan

 

Hi Teila,

Thank you for the kind words! I will let Andrew know of your compliments about the blender tutorial, much appreciated.

Very cool to see you have so much interest in our product. In regards to Cinema Mo Cap, you will notice no difference at all between using the Kinect for Windows or the Xbox 360 sensor. Setup, regardless of which one you use, is the exact same. Just make sure that if you do decide to go with the Xbox 360 Kinect, that you buy the USB cable for the PC. You can find these by searching on Amazon.

It was intentional for us to support both devices seamlessly as we figured there would be thousands of people who have 360 Kinects sitting on their entertainment shelves not being used much anymore, especially game devs.

Awesome to hear about your teens getting into movie production. Keep an eye out for Cinema Pro Cams, which we are releasing shortly on the Unity Asset store. It brings real-world movie/film compliant lens data into Unity3D. In March we also plan on releasing Cinema Director - a full timeline cutscene/previz/sequencing editor for Unity where you can control the entire Unity environment in time - perfect for Previz'ing movie projects.

Cheers,

Dan

 

Thank you, Dan. Those sound perfect for my girls. I will keep an eye out for them.

 

I have a question for you guys and if this is the wrong place to post then please let me know where to ask this question:


How come the models neck is broken when I add the animation that I just imported from blender like the picture above.

 

Hi Tmanallen,

You may have found a big or issue we didn't catch for sure. Can you please send this problem over to us - support@cinema-suite.com or post in our forum - cinema-suite.com/forum?

We will get you fixed up.

Thanks,

Dan

 

Just sent from my yahoo: tac_allen@yahoo.com

Thanks for your quick reply.

 

Awesome asset,

Been experimenting with the package and it works quite well.

Starting to make more advanced motion capture and feel that one kinect is a bit too limited.

Support for Dual Kinect would make the package so much more Wicked to use.

cheers.

 

Just bought Cinema Mo Cap and love the interface. It's easy to capture motion and assign it to various meshes. That part works well.

The feet and hands do flop around a lot so none of the motions I've captured are usable without clean up in Blender. I'm not very experienced with that so any tips would help. Otherwise, the animations captured really have a nice sense of life to them that hand animated motions don't really display.

 

Just wanted to let everyone know that the issue pointed out above was fixed in an earlier version of Cinema Mo Cap. No issues with the current version on the store. Thanks!

 

Hey kenlem, thanks for your comments and feedback. We have two tutorials on YouTube about cleaning up the captures in both Blender (http://youtu.be/CKK-T1l57m8) and Maya (http://youtu.be/DNQURfzBINs).

In an upcoming release we are adding a body mask feature, which will allow you to select/deselect the parts of the body you want to capture. For example: isolate the upper body, or turn off ankles and wrists.

 

Any news on dual camera support?

 

Hello, I finally got a USB adapter to hook my Kinect up to my PC, installed the SDK, but now I'm running into a problem. After maybe 1-2 minutes the motion capture freezes up and I have to unplug, plug in in my Kinect to get it working again.

EDIT: Nevermind, it was the USB port that was the problem.

 

Hi TonyLi,

No dual camera support yet. Right now we are focusing on releasing Cinema Director for early April, and once that is out, we are back to Mo Cap dev.

 

Okay, thanks for the update!

 

Ok, so I recorded some animations, used the Unity editor to make them looping, and made a simple blend tree. However, for some reason my model immediately jumps a few meters below his transform and jumps up or down a few meters during transitions.

 

Try playing with the Root Transform Position (Y) - Offset parameter in the animation inspector. Here is a page that describes how it works: https://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/RootMotion.html

Email us if you are still having problems after trying this.

 

Thanks, my Root Transform was based on Original, so I set it to Feet and they're at the right level now. However, all my animations seem to be tilted forward about 10 degrees, which is trickier. Would you prefer I asked about such things via email?

 

Yes, would you mind sending us an email to support@cinema-suite.com? We will make sure to get your question over to the developer(s) to get things working properly for you!

 

If you guys don't mind, please share this kind of situation on the forum because we will have the same problems and need to know how to resolve it.

 

Rocki. Sorry about that. We something ask to forward us the issue, because we do not want to flood the forum if the issue goes back and forth a bunch of times. We will do our best to post the final result here. We also have our own forums for help and support - cinema-suite.com/forum.

In this case, we believe it is happening because the Kinect is tilted. It must stay level during motion capture. In a future version of Cinema Mo Cap, we are going to try and have the Kinect actually detect where the floor is in relation to the capture target, so that animations are always level regardless of tilt.

Thanks,

Dan

 

Congratulations on releasing Cinema Pro Cams! It looks great! (And it's on sale right now, everyone -- go buy it! )

Any updates on dual Kinect support?

 

Hi TonyLi,

We are still working on feasibility studies, and also putting together a team to tackle this. To have 2 Kinects, live inside of Unity without having to do any camera work or post processing, etc. is a huge challenge. Please trust that we are working hard on this, and that it is still high on our priority list.

Thanks!

Dan

 

Thanks for the update, Dan. I hear you. Even iPi Soft records and post-processes video from dual camera setups; it doesn't process at the same time it's recording. I could certainly live with such a two-stage process in Cinema Mo-Cap if it meant being able to capture things like crossing my arms or turning.

 

I'm still waiting on the Mac version I asked you about last year

 

MrDude.

Not good news on the Mac front, despite our best efforts, we couldn't avoid Apple buying Primesense and closing them down. This leaves us high and dry. Please see our official response here:

http://cinema-suite.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=36&p=167#p167

You can still use basecamp or Parallels to run Cinema Mo Cap. I wish we had a better answer. But we cannot continue development on obsolete drivers/firmware. etc. until we know what Apple's plans are.

Sorry again,

Dan

 

Any chance you'll be supporting kinect 2.0 ? I'd also like to add my voice to those pestering you about dual kinect support. I've been holding off on getting mocap software for a while, am hoping you guys can pull something off soon...

 

+1 again about dual Kinect support. I know I keep pestering about this, but it's because I'm a big believer in Cinema Mo-Cap. It has a great interface, and it's ideal that it runs right inside Unity. Unfortunately, it's unusable right now since I can't capture any motions where my arms move in front of my body or if I turn more than 90 degrees. It has so much potential if it can just offer this one feature.

 

Also +1 for dual, please.

 

I see that this is on sale today.

It looks amazing. But there have not been any updates in a while.

I'll buy this at full price as soon as you support dual Kinect2. Even if you double the price.

 

The fact they haven't replied in months is very disappointing. Even their own forum seems pretty dead. I'd have been happy to scoop this up if there was any activity, but sale or no sale, any money spent on an unsupported and unfinished product is money wasted in my opinion. Seeing this go on sale is kind of aggravating to be honest.

 

I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt, since they've been hard at work on Cinema Director, and they might have been busy at Unite. I was an early purchaser of Cinema Mo Cap because it has so much potential. But without dual camera support it's useless to me, since I can't capture any motion where the actor's hands are in front of his body or if he turns more than 60 degrees. I ended up going with iPi Soft's system instead, but I would go back to Cinema Mo Cap in a heartbeat if it had dual camera support.

 

Hi Guys,

We are not inactive on development for Cinema Mo Cap. Sorry if it comes across that way. As TonyLi mentions, Cinema Director had to be a priority for us to complete "The Cinema Suite" which is our 3 product offerings. This is something we will bundle down the road. This is also the order that we had to do things in accordance with our business plan. As you can all appreciate, development always takes more time than expected, especially when you want a high quality product that is rich in features.

I will admit that with us being buried in development of our other products, we have not given the Unity forums as much attention as we should. This will change.

Now that Cinema Director is released, we've moved back to improving Cinema Mo Cap. This includes Kinect 2 support. Our results are encouraging and we are 100% confident we can complete this in the coming weeks. As for dual Kinect, this is a far more difficult solution that we've brought some outside resources in to help develop but that is farther down the horizon. I will say from what I've seen with our testing on Kinect 2, it fills the gap VERY nicely in it's ability to cross arms, turn, move hands, etc.

Our forums are actually quite active, but we don't have the volume that a place like this would have. Keep in mind we are a business built from the ground up over the past year or so. Gaining followers from the community takes time. Just in Help and Support for Mo Cap we have 24 topics with over 100 posts, with thousands of views. It's active.

We are very open about methods to contact us. We usually answer forum posts within 48 hours. Support emails are answered in the same amount of time. As for the latest 24 hour sale on Cinema Mo Cap, we were actually not even aware it was going on sale so we were as surprised as you are.

Let's be fair here. For a 60 dollar product (even more insane at 30 dollars when it was on sale), the existing version of Cinema Mo Cap is actually quite powerful and much less of a workflow to work with than pretty much any other solution out there. Do we have some short comings? Of course. But we are by no means finished with development.

I have no problems taking this conversation offline if anyone else has any additional questions. You can email us at support - support@cinema-suite.com or email me personally - dan@cinema-suite.com and I'd be happy to keep you up to date.

As always, we really appreciate the input from everyone!

Thanks.

Dan

 

From browsing other similar softwares' forums, most of them seem to think kinect 2.0 is only slightly better than aa single kinect 1.0 for mocap; whereas dual kinect is pretty significant upgrade in ability. I guess its on you to prove that wrong.

 

Dan - Or if Kinect 2 can capture turns as you suggest! Thank you for the update, and congratulations on releasing Cinema Director!

 

hi Guys. An update from Adrian in our own forums, on where we are progressing with Cinema Mo-Cap, and some of the new features coming. Thanks you TonyLi for always being a contributor!

Here is the current news on all things mocap:
- We have Kinect 2 working. YES!
- We are currently updating the rig so that it can take Joint Orientation data. This means for example, you can twist your arms, which is a huge improvement! <= It's important to get this working before we release, so that users can have noticeable improvement.
- We are working on an editor, so that you can improve the animation after capture. This will have automatic outlier removal and keyframe reducer.
- These will be two separate updates coming out for all current users (free).
- A single camera cannot do 360 degree turns, not sure if that was poorly communicated before, the Kinect 2 does appear to have better rotational range however (empirically).

- We continue to progress on dual kinects but it is extremely challenging. Can't really give a solid date for this.

 

So all models must be full body? What if the model is just a humanoid torso? Will Cinema Mo Cap still work?

 

If your model can be a humanoid rig then there should be no issue at all! Feel free to email us the model if you would like us to test - support@cinema-suite.com

 

Is body masking still incoming at some point?