Kinect and MakeHuman for animation capture

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Kinect and MakeHuman for animation capture

Postby skurdakov » Sat Feb 05, 2011 12:42 pm

I searched forum for Kinect info and found none.

So would like to bring community attention to one interesting direction.

You know that there Kinect now can be used on PC, due to free drivers.

There is an example NiUserTracker which tracks skeleton

https://github.com/OpenNI/OpenNI/tree/m ... serTracker see demo at youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI7iLmLDdoA how it looks like ( note kinect has not only depth camera but also true video camera )

now what comes to mind?

There is an approach to fit mesh to video:

http://openmesh.org/uploads/media/Hornung_TR10.pdf

but with depth information, which provides kinect and also already existing library of human features in MakeHuman, motion tracking in MakeHuman/Blender might become a real time desktop solution:

using depth camera it is possible to roughly fit MakeHuman character to scene human quite easily, then, when mesh is fitted to track using both video and depth information.

of cause I understand, that such task could take quite a bit of time to implement - still, being implemented - this will open motion capture for masses workflow: currently, as you may see on youtube video - tracking skeleton in Kinect in not precise, but using mesh fitting and also video hints - it might output quite good motion capture data.
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Re: Kinect and MakeHuman for animation capture

Postby workinprogress » Mon Feb 14, 2011 10:36 pm

Are there any plans to make it track precisely enough to recognize the positions of fingers, and feet, rather than just tracking the hand-wrist-and-forearm, lower-leg-and-foot, as a single unit?
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Re: Kinect and MakeHuman for animation capture

Postby mitz » Wed Mar 27, 2013 8:09 pm

Hi,

I'm a student at ESTG Leiria and I am doing a project which consists in teaching gest language (in Portuguese) to people.
I'm making a model with this program, which is kinda nice.

I need to animate the model and I'm searching in a way to do it with Kinect but all the solutions are paid!
Does anyone here knows how can I animate the model through the Kinect? (Must be free due to school licenses).

Thanks a lot guys.
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Re: Kinect and MakeHuman for animation capture

Postby duststorm » Thu Mar 28, 2013 1:12 am

mitz wrote:Does anyone here knows how can I animate the model through the Kinect? (Must be free due to school licenses).

There are free tools, such as the Brekel tool or blender ni-mate, that let you record Kinect motions into BVH format.
You can also find many examples of kinect integration with 3d engines like Ogre3d, or smartbody, however most of these solutions will probably still require some programming on your part.

If you're not up to that, I think ni-mate for blender or recording a BVH with brekel's tool are your best options. The BVH file can be imported and used in blender.

Be aware, though, that the kinect is not very accurate at pose registration (at least not with the default algorithms). It is better suited for recognizing poses than actually recording the motions.
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Re: Kinect and MakeHuman for animation capture

Postby mitz » Thu Mar 28, 2013 1:34 am

Thanks duststorm, for the reply.

I tried the ni-mate but the precision doesn't cover the hands, only the arms, or am I wrong?
Thanks
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Re: Kinect and MakeHuman for animation capture

Postby mitz » Thu Mar 28, 2013 1:34 am

Thanks duststorm, for the reply.

I tried the ni-mate but the precision doesn't cover the hands, only the arms, or am I wrong?
Thanks
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Re: Kinect and MakeHuman for animation capture

Postby duststorm » Thu Apr 18, 2013 12:08 am

mitz wrote:I tried the ni-mate but the precision doesn't cover the hands, only the arms, or am I wrong?

You're correct. As I mentioned before ni-mate (and the microsoft algorithm) are quite bogus for performing real mocap. They are mostly only useful for very rough pose recognition, to use for human computer interaction applications, not for something like recording motions.

Ipi soft has an easily useable but commercial software that you can use with one or two kinects that will probably do what you want.
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