Are any professional studios using Optitrack?

[dtaylor112]

I did my own small survey calling around to MoCap studios and they all (or most) seem to use Vicon.

Are there any studios out there using Optitrack or is it more of a "smaller indie" type of setup? (ie: very small studios and individuals) - do any of you run studios using Optitrack? how's that going? Very curious.

Any info is greatly appreciated.

Thank You

[neill_solow]

Hi,

I'm using Optitrack cameras for capturing animation in my studio. There is some info and demo video here - http://neill3d.com/freelance-mocap-studio

I have greate result on capturing, but for building skeletons and operating with raw data I have written my own program.

[dtaylor112]

Another questions for anyone on the board who's doing this motion capture stuff professionally (or somewhat professionally)

What are the areas one needs to be excellent (or very good) in?
* Reading/creating raw data
* programming/coding
* etc?

As of right now I know how to set up the cameras, get the footage, clean the footage up a bit, export it... what would/should one expect to deal with if they're dealing with clients?

Should one be able to read the data and change it IN notepad? I'm sure I'm missing a bunch but up until now I've been using it for just myself and getting some pretty good results from it. Thinking about utilizing optitrack for others as well.

Thanks

[russfrancis]

I owned a motion capture studio for 4 years using an STT Optical system from Spain (First in US to do so) And used it for multiple professional projects with incredible results. The system worked great, but was underdeveloped and hard to get support for.

During that time we had several Vicon users come to our studio and gawk at how great our motion was in such a short time frame. They would say the Vicon could work with multiple actors and had a very large space but would take eons of cleanup to get it all right where most of our data was clean and ready to ship to the client within hours or a few days for larger projects. The Vicon has improved since then but given the price of a standard vicon system, my STT system was a no brainer for any project we took on including two very large scale video games "Advent Rising" and "Bloodrayne 2"

I sold that system to a game company a few years back and recently purchased an Optitrack system. I would dare say that with the exception of the smaller capture volume, it's a better system than my old STT. The data is very impressive and detailed and requires very little to no clean up in most cases. I have yet to do any professional projects this time around but I'm still setting up my new business. I am currently bidding on several high end professional projects and am very confident that it will give me everything I need to fully satisfy my clients. The clients I have currently sent samples to are very impressed so far.

Areas I would say you would need to be excellent in are:

1. learning to read curves and raw data. My team has gotten to the point over the years that we rarely even look at the markers, we look at the curves and go through them and find any issues very quickly.
2. Learn your software. If you clean up in Arena then learn to master every aspect of it. If you clean up in Motion Builder then same thing.
3. You don't need to learn every aspect of other 3d apps like Maya, Max, XSI etc. but you do need to know how they work together when passing data back and forth. In my experience, the easiest way to do that has been using the FBX plugin for Motionbuilder. I've have very good results moving data using FBX but it's not always a sure thing. Be willing to try and learn new methods and spend a lot of time in the R&D stage.
4. know what data is best. BVH is great for a lot of simple things but you lose data integrity when using BVH. Find out which data paths provide the most complete amount of data information and try to export in that format. If you have to use BVH, then learn how it scripts together. Overall, be willing to spend a lot of time experimenting with how different formats work with different programs.

With the Optitrack system, you can get very good results out of the box without need for a programmer but it does help to have someone around with great troubleshooting skills. If you plan to use your own methods or do a lot of custom stuff then you will want a programmer around to help.

FYI Rockstar Games uses an Optitrack system in case you are still looking for evidence of this system being used in large studio settings. A friend of mine who is running an 18 camera Optitrack system for Rockstar mentioned that they are very impressed with the data quality. (Hearing that actually compelled me to research and eventually purchase an Optitrack for myself).

Hope that helps!

[dtaylor112]

Thanks Russ, this does help. A bunch.

Two questions:

1. I would assume I'd need to get Maya/3DS in order to utilize the FBX plugin - is there anyway around this? Or is it a case of "I get 3DS and learn touse the FBX plugin or I don't" kinda thing.

2. It's funny that you say to get a programmer to help with this as I'm a QA Engineer (not a programmer) and good friends of mine work at Rockstar in the QA dept. but what skillset should a Programmer have in order to work with the raw data? Java? JS? C++? Ruby On Rails? etc?

I'm sure there's a specific skillset when working with motion capture raw data I'm just not sure what it is. Most of the programmers I've worked with are web guys. Any words of advice in that area?

Thanks again for the help - it's appreciated.

[russfrancis]

You don't necessarily need to have other packages but you need access to the other packages to make sure you are exporting everything correctly. You can always download trials of the latest versions of Maya, Max, XSI and Motionbuilder to test everything out. I own them all because I service a lot of different areas so if you were serious in starting a service studio then yes you'd probably want to own each program you intend to work in, but like I said there are workarounds, for example working directly with the studio you are providing data for and using their programs for testing.

As for programming, you'd have to look at each program to see what they use. In Motionbuilder I believe it's still Python, some are C++ and C.

Working with raw mocap data is more of an art than a technique. Arena does all the back end work for you for solving rotation and translational data, so you just need to clean up any swap and jitter and gap issues for the most part. That can be done right in the Arena software or within Motionbuilder. It takes patience to learn but once you get it mastered then it's old hat. Personally in the 5+ years I've worked with motion capture I've never needed a programmer of my own but I've never done custom work that requires it. If you are planning on doing things like quadrupeds and so forth then you'd need a programmer to set that up for you or you need to wait until Optitrack supports it.

[dtaylor112]

Excellent - sorry for the late response but this forum doesn't seem to contact you when you have a new post!

OK I get it, quadrupeds, not looking to do that anytime soon. Makes sense what you've said, I'll refer to this email for info/guidance as I start out. I'm thinking of starting out small and gathering new software etc as needed - should be interesting.

I think I've made enough films using the system to have the hang of it but you can never know a software TOO well! Will keep the forum posted. Now I just need the space!

Thanks!

[russfrancis]

Actually if you go to the top of the page you can select topic options and then click to add to your watched topics. That way you will get emails whenever a response comes in. Glad I could help. Just post here if you have any more questions!

[beyondmotion]

Hi guys,

Could you please let me know, what is the maximum capturing volume that I can achieve with optic tract system.

respectively 18 cam and 24 cam.

Cheers _ B

[bsteagal]

Buddhi:

Hi!.. the max volume is approximately 10x10 feet, regardless of the amount of cameras you have. Having 18 or 24 cameras serve more for data accuracy than anything else, and they allow you to capture up to 2 actors at a time.


Bryan