$4000 wasted on a Rokoko Mocap Suit
- Thread starter erikals
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Greenlaw
Eat your peas.
Thanks for sharing those videos! I always wondered what I might be missing out on by not using a suit for mocap. Very interesting. Rokoko seems surprisingly flawed, especially for what it costs.
I still use iPi Mocap Studio at home, now with two Azure Kinect sensors. But apart from initial testing with the Azure Kinects, I've done very little mocap in the last couple of years. Sigh!
I still use iPi Mocap Studio at home, now with two Azure Kinect sensors. But apart from initial testing with the Azure Kinects, I've done very little mocap in the last couple of years. Sigh!
u're Welcome
i actually just bought a Kinect and iPi Express ($200)
but it will take some time before i get it going. (swamped, again)
they are jumping to subscription soon, so better get Perpetual whilst one can... !
Greenlaw
Eat your peas.
I agree, mocap is really only financially worthwhile when it can actually save time and/or money, and that depends on the scope and nature of the project.
I've mentioned this before but many years ago, I worked on a small team of artists (around 10 people, maybe fewer) on a series of Call Of Duty commercials which required hundreds of animated soldiers. There was absolutely no way we could animate all that by hand and have it look like anything. As animators, we were kind lukewarm to the idea of using mocap after we began working out the nuts and bolts of the projects, we became true believers. It was going to be hard enough building out all the assets (characters, European villages and cities, specific military ordnance and vehicles, etc., ) and creating all the visual effects for those commercials. For this team, the scope of these commercials were unusually 'epic', and we no longer viewed mocap as a crutch but essential tool!
As some users here know, I've also dabbled with mocap for small personal projects, and a few b-movies back when I was freelancing from home. That's when having a setup like iPi Mocap Studio paid off because I was able to set up in my living room or garage in minutes and knock some complex motions out very quickly, so I could get back to focusing on other things like design, modeling, lighting and vfx. But getting the system operational wasn't easy. Before using mocap in my own projects, I spent countless hours experimenting and practicing performance capture, figuring out how to overcome the system's limitations, and learning from experienced professional mocap users in this forum and elsewhere. Additionally, I had to purchase a decent set of tools for editing and re-targeting the mocap data for my characters. Investing all this time to develop a workflow was fine when mocap a hobby for me, but before I could trust myself to use mocap as a freelancer on jobs with an actual budget and delivery schedule, I had to be sure the pipeline was rock solid.
These days, I'm mostly animating cartoon characters and non-human characters by hand, and mocap isn't appropriate or applicable in these projects. Plus, while the animation studio where I work is one of the larger ones, it very rarely uses mocap in its productions.
So, when I do use mocap these days, it's mainly going to be for fun and curiosity. I still have that one 'mocap' project I've been working on forever, and a few smaller projects I still want to do...if I can ever make time to clean out the garage. Hopefully this year? (Sigh!)
I should make it clear that I enjoy animating by hand, and I still don't think of mocap as 'animation'. This isn't snobbery...to me, using mocap is more like puppetry, and I like working with puppets too. It's just another useful tool in my toolbox.
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