Kinect Motion capture

The film is heavily character driven, as such we will need to spend a large portion of the production period on hand animation. As such we have been exploring alternatives. One method that we explored is the use of the Microsoft Xbox Kinect.

Jasper Brekel (http://www.brekel.com) has recently released a useful app for both 3d scan data and motion capture aquisition from the Kinect. Its not an optical, laser scan accurate device - but for an affordable, off the shelf solution - its amazingly good.

Here is an initial test of the workflow (Kinect->MotionBuilder->3DS Max). Note that the animation has not been cleaned at all as such this is the raw animation data captured by the Kinect and placed on to a CAT rig.

Kinect MoCap Test from Tex Jagger on Vimeo.