Kinect Mocap and my daz studio animation utilities

mCasual

I created the animation in this video using a Kinect sensor ( a 3D camera) attached to a PC and a program called Brekel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYEv7gtg68w

there also was much polishing of the animation using free scripts on my web site.

those scripts can really save you many hours of work

So here's a rundown of what you need

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a typical low used price for the kinect sensor is, say, $60.
in Canada i often see it new for $100
search for "kinect sensor" at Amazon.com

if you buy it used and the power/usb adapter is missing, you can get one for about $9
search for "kinect power adapter" at Amazon.com

At www.Brekel.com, or at openni.org you can get the kinect drivers, which will be placed in your c:\Program Files\PrimeSense\SensorKinect\Driver folder. When you plug the kinect in your PC and Windows cant find the drivers, that's where you tell it to look.

Once that's done, you use brekel itself from www.Brekel.com and can do motion capture and save the results as BVH files.

Then you can import/apply this animation to the Daz characters.

For the mocap session shown in the video, i told Brekel to save this as a "SecondLife" BVH file

Then in Daz Studio, i applied this BVH to a free SecondLife character distributed by Linden Labs.
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Create_Animations_with_Poser

then i saved this animation as a Daz Pose Preset file

then i applied this pose-preset-animation to Aiko3.

For animation cleanup, i suggest the following scripts from me !

my sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts2/

the important animation tweaking scripts:

mcjDecimate : removes overly-snappy movements by reducing the number of keyframes

mcjAutolimb : stabilize the position of hands and feet ( for cases where the character is slip-sliding about

mcjKeepOrient: keep limbs oriented in the same direction, example: keep feet still even while legs are moving

mcjCycleFilter: view, modify or synthesize animation curves

mcjLookAtTheCamera: make your character track the current camera with great precision

mcjMakeTarget: create target nodes for mcjAutoLimb

mcjHoldOn: keep hands or feet "glued" to something

mcjSetInterpolation : linearize the movements of things like cameras and doors to remove overshoot and non-constant speeds

SceneGraf plugin for DS3 only, view and tweak animation curves