plotting motion from ARENA to a Motionbuilder Character

[gotoxy]

Hi!

I have promblems recording the motion streamed from Area to MB.

I installed the plugins, setup a MB actor, assigned the data comming from Arena to the MB actor, merged my MB character into the scene, defined the actor as input for this character.
All is working fine, my character moves as expected.
But how can i plot the motion caputre data to my character skeleton for exporting it as fbx?

Or in general how can i record the motion capture date streamed from arena in MB?

I have no idea, hope you can fill the dark spot with light!

Cheers
Sven

btw: we had some difficulties calibrating the optitrack system to get great/excellent results. We tried a lot of movements and speeds using the calibration wand, realigned the cameras, spent hours and hours waving and dancing in the capure volume. Finally we setup a kind of a fishing rod with the reflective ball of the wand as the bait. After a bit of practice in fishing we got top calibration results.

[Jim]

Hello:

Great calibration story, it is a bit of an art, but once you get it, it seems to not be an issue any more. One of these days we should post all the different techniques people use.

I will jump in here with a quick reply, but someone more technical will probably correct or add to my post during the work week. If you can't record the Optical Data in MB, I believe this is a known bug we have in the 1.0 release. You should be able to record the characters motion, but not the optical data. We will have a fix for this in the next release, which is due out in about 2 weeks time.

[seanboyette]

gotoxy,

At the moment you cannot record directly in MB (this will be post 1.0, it is useful for real time preview however), the worflow that I use is:

Arena --> Point Cloud
Point Cloud imported into MB, Create Actor, assign Point Cloud to Marker Set
Use Actor as Input for Character Rig.


Sean

[gotoxy]

@jim: yeah, calibration is a bit tricky. The first few times we got horrible results, often it even failed to calibrate at all. A few hours later we got enough practice in waving and dancing with the wand getting good results and best results with our fishing rod. My colleague is born to fish! His results are always excellent!

@sean: thanks for the quick reply. I'll try your workflow today.


Cheers
Sven

[gotoxy]

Hi Sean,

just tested the c3d import in MB to drive my actor witch inputs the data to my character. All is working fine.

In another thread here in the forum you told something about a 1 cam facial pusher plug. Is this a development of your own, or is it available for other users?

Cheers
Sven

[seanboyette]

its something that I did - if you ware interested in it - email me. It still has some minor issues - but useable with only one cam!