please someone give me a clue?????!!!??

[Alessia8086]

Hi again
problems seems to rise like mushrooms and we are honestly getting tired of testing wihtout any improovements, im attaching to this topic an image to explain how strange all this is...

we are simple trying to have the face wizard to finally work, but we cant.
Seems that we can have decent point cloud only at night, we never read nowhere that we need totally black room to see some markers but its ok, now we are trying to have the face wizard to work but we cant in any way can someone please give us a feedback of the correct pipeline?
its correct open data to import a previous calibration? or we should do in another way?
we go to facial wizard, we record couple of seconds then we start to make the segments sections..
there is a special order in which this must be done?
we come across the "origin" thing how this works?
sorry to make to you all those questions but we are under a deadline and there is no way we can work with expression..
thanks for any help

Alessia

[bsteagal]

Hi Alessia

Ok, it is always a good idea to do a new calibration every time you sit down to do a capture, because even after a few hours, cameras have a tendency to shift a little, which cause capture problems.

How many markers are you using? is this a custom configuration? (which seems to be the case by the images above) any reason why you cannot use one of the standard templates? (the 37+4 is a very good template)

Light can be somewhat of an issue, but usually only if there is direct sunlight coming into your capture volume or behind your actor, and sometimes this can cause issues. Also, since you are using a "small" capture volume, I've noticed if you have a lot of natural light, you might want to tone down the "intensity" settings of the IR ring (basically, you reduce the amount of IR light the LED's produce)

You finish the camera calibration, what are you getting for results of this calibration? you should be getting at least "great" and preferrably "excellent" or "exceptional" Are you using a 3 marker wand or 1 marker wand? When doing the 3 marker camera calibration, I use only the "very high" setting. You set the ground plane with z facing the cameras... then save your calibration

you do the facial wizard.. you set the 4 head markers and normally that is all you have to set, after this I normally just click next until it saves your face template.

When you go to start a capture, what happens? sometimes you have to move around a bit in your capture volume for the system to recognize the template you recorded (I pass my hands in front of my face or make facial gestures and the pattern fixes itself.. then you start capture..

Tell me what steps are you taking , perhaps there is something you are skipping... I can't tell much by the images above..

Bryan

[farstar]

I would just try using the standard 37+4 marker set and see if you have any luck.

[Alessia8086]

thanks for taking the time to give us some answers
First thing we go with a custom setup of 50 markers based on our facial rigging tecniques so its a need for us to be able to use a custome marker set.
After doing the calibration we usually get a " exceptional " ( and a very high as the calculation )in less then 2 minutes, ground plane is allways set with z towards camera on a tripod, we usually do a calibration everytime due to our constant problems in getting it to work right.
We have try aswell to just set up the 4 head markers but we for some reason the markers after " review " change position and after going back to the play button it messed up completelly even if actor its perfectly in place.
At the moment is almost a week in test and try that its not leading to any results.
Alessia

[Alessia8086]

so..after trying aswell the 37+4 solution still we cant have the face rig to stay in place, we've made a small video showing what is going on maybe this can help even more..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0nezEhtOG0

[farstar]

Firs of I would like to say I went throught this exact nightmare on my first time with they system. I would say from what I am seeing on this video that your facemarkers are not on your face properly. On your Left top eyelide the marker you can not see when your eye is open. You have markers on side of nose were those should be set on face near nose but not to close. your upper lip mid poinst are to close to center upper lip. You back chin marker is to far back. Also the one you have on the side of nose move it to the smile crease near the corner mouth but noto to close. I would also cover that back window you got a lot of daylight coming into that room.

[Alessia8086]

Hi Far star, yes markers where not perfectly in place during that video but we have done tests with markers in place and still seems impossible for us to track anything, we are gonna close the window behinde today to see if this help to fix some problems..
thank you for your help i will post the result asap

[DonBurroni]

Your head is not in the center of the cameras too, try to aim them all to one point, use a marker on a tripod to help aim the camera to where your head will be.

Also when you made the template you had two markers showing up on the middle right eyebrow. Try to off set the eye markers so they dont meet and the middle three mouth markers are too close for my liking too.

You seem to have more camera i would get them involved too.

All the best
Burroni

[NaturalPoint - Mike]

From the pictures that you sent me at the end of last week, the cameras are very far away from the actor with a lot of spacing between them, causing significant marker occlusion. You also appear to have additional cameras, and for this marker setup I would recommend using every camera you have available to you.

Another customer posted a facial mocap session video in our forums, and reviewing it may help to see how they set up their cameras for a 12 camera system. You can find the link here:

http://forum.naturalpoint.com/forum/ubb ... #Post46413

[Alessia8086]

thanks for the link and tips we are going to fix the setup and try tomorrow with 12 cameras, we've bought 2 stands too with a black cloth behinde the actor, so lets see if this will finally help us to get a good track, but one question rise, if those cameras are too far means that for the body i need 100 cameras to have a smooth capture? or body its a different thing?