[post-1.0] SmartBody - character animation system for Ogre

[Chris]

Mocap is also a problem for non-human characters. Creatures won't work so well (I don't think many of us could do a mud crab particularly well..), nor would beast races since they have digitigrade feet and a tail.

[silentthief]

And how free is that? Is it just gratis? Does it include all the animations we'd need, both for regular characters and beast races? That last website looks extremely shady, by the way. Doing all that work, free of charge too?

If it pans out, great, but I am very skeptical.

I won't lie, I just entered "free mocap" into the search engine and those were the first four listed. I really don't know those sites. I just was explaining that there are free mocaps out there. I don't know anything about the quality or what. As for the last one, my guess is that they convert it for you but also keep the mocap themselves. I dunno, you probably know more about mocap than I do, I just looked up free mocaps once before because I know you can use them in animation.

ST

[Okulo]

I dunno, you probably know more about mocap than I do, I just looked up free mocaps once before because I know you can use them in animation.

I don't know shit about mocap.

[SquireNed]

Theoretically, it would be possible to proxy tails as physics objects to a normal human mocap, but this has a number of downsides; they would have to be highly tuned to reflect accurate movement and the original mocap may need scaling and adjustment to look realistic.

[Okulo]

Thing is, if people would want to create their own animations, they'll have to do that anyway. I'm just thinking that a lot of work could be saved if these animations could be mocapped. Wouldn't the mocapper be able to export to BVH and let animators finish the job?

[Chris]

Mocap could be useful if it takes less work to clean up the results and add the necessary extras (e.g. tails) than it is to just make an animation from scratch (with or without visual references). I unfortunately know nothing of actually making animations.

[SquireNed]

Speaking as someone who's not competent enough to take on a serious project, but did do a semester of animation as part of a class, it really depends on the quality of the mo-cap to the model with rigging. If either the model, mo-cap, or rigging decide to be wonky, you're not actually going to be much better off with a mo-cap, except for realism if, like me, you can't do your own sans-reference postures.

[Tarius]

My largest concern with mocapping is that it's only as good as the person being capped. If you asked me to be your motion capture guy you'd better be happy with clumsy strutting around and the occasional halfhearted jump off the ground. I don't know if we have any professional athletes/stuntpeople around to ask for some of the more awesome stuff that mocapping can provide.

I on the other hand would not be clumsy at all. You know the last time I fell? I dont either actually. In fact I once started slipping on ice and caught myself without touching anything.

Anyway, one of the huge problems with why animations are so scarce compared to models or anything else is the fact that mo-cap has been rather expensive and not too easy to set up. In fact, I would have to think that of all the things that are starting to become widespread, motion capture has been lagging behind.

[Br0ken]

New autorigger and reshaper for 3D human body scans (by SmartBody dev)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1kCK3DKrNA

[psi29a]

That's cool.