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Hello!

A few days ago I read an article about your company and the 5.000 $ Mocap system. This might have happened just in the right moment.
We are a few people preparing to run a little start-up media company in Europe. For an upcoming animation task, we might need some mocap data to bring some 3d characters to life.

Unfortunately I have never had the chance to work with any mocap equipment, before.
So my questions are: how long do you think might a 3d artist need to learn how to use OptiTrack? Some days? Weeks? Months?
And how steep is the learning curve concerning cleaning/reducing moccap data in your ARENA software?

Is it possible/advisable to directly import MocapData into 3ds max character-studio? Or should we first try to reduce/clear up the data?

Please don't get me wrong. I am used to learn dificult software packages. And to me it is obvious that mocap is not an easy task.
I just ask these questions to be able to better calculate preparation time which we might need before the project starts.

Hello:

Thanks for your interest in our mocap system!

Optical motion capture can take some time to perfect, as far as all the different elements, such as camera placement, suit marker placement, capturing data and exporting. We have tried to make this process as smooth and easy to understand as possible, especially considering our low price point will allow a lot more people to use the system that might not have direct experience with mocap.

All in all, setup and your first capture could happen the same day you get the hardware, especially if you are familiar with complex programs like Maya and Max.


We expect that most users will export the data to Maya or Max, and you can do that via BVH or take the 3D markers (C3D) and assign them to skeletons, like in Motion Builder.

Cleaning up data isn't that hard, or bad, most of it is automated. I usually find that you can just quickly review your captured data and see if it looks good, if the skeleton is fitting nicely and if not, fix the problem at the capture side. We are somewhat unique in that we fit the skeleton in real time, during the initial capture, so you can get real time feedback if the data is of good quality.

ARENA is in the Alpha test phase now, we hope to be shipping units in a few months time. If you need a system sooner than that, we can talk about our Alpha and Beta test programs.

Thanks!

Thank you for this information!