Has Anyone Tried FastMocap ?

GnotMe

If you have not heard of it, FastMocap works with the Microsoft Kinect Video Capture device to do motion capture which can be imported into most 3D programs, including Poser and DAZ Studio.

For anyone who is not familiar with the Kinect device, it is usually purchased as an add on, or is bundled with the XBox 360. If you buy a standalone Kinect it will have a power supply and standard USB connector. If your Kinect came bundled with XBox 360, then you will need to buy an adapter because the bundled Kinect has an incompatible combination power supply/USB connector.

You can watch a demo video on their website as well as 2 tutorial videos (Install and first use on a Mac notebook)

http://www.fastmocap.com

You can watch the captured motion live, save the capture, and then import it into your 3D program.

FastMocap sells for $149 for the Standard and $179 (Windows, intro discount) and $199 (Mac) Pro Edition. The Pro edition has more export features.
There is no demo/trial version available at this time. Purchasers download the software and then go through an activation procedure.

Competing software products cost far more, so this is of great interest to anyone who cannot afford those higher prices.

I've never done any motion capture, so comments from anyone who is knowledgeable about this would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,

Dan

ReDave

That's very interesting, thanks for bringing it up! This video hasn't been added to their site yet (you're too fast! ;-)), and it shows some live recordings, among which a rotation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDtZRFVI1oA
I do like it supports Asus Xtion cameras!
Competition is rapidly expanding in the sector. Ipisoft claims to do extra computations with specialised algorithms but I haven't tried it yet. There are also Brekel and nuiCapture, but both only support Kinects for now. Brekel seems like the cheapest so far, offering also face tracking for the same price as FastMocap Pro, but a friend of mine tried Brekel and didn't like it.
Another problem is that I'm not sure how well the BVH import in DS works nowadays (export is awful :-( ), but IIRC it used to work fine in some of the DS3 days, so a definite plus for us is if pz2 export is included.

GnotMe

ReDave,

Thanks for your input and very interesting list of additional motion capture programs using less expensive hardware. What was it that your friend did not like about the Brekel program (body or face capture) ?

Dan

Links for the programs you mentioned along with pricing:

nuiCapture Animate $399
Body & Face capture use 1 or 2 Kinects (Windows 7 only ?)

http://nuicapture.com/

Brekel separate Pro package for Body and Facial Capture $99 each (basic version, no updates, no support Free)

http://www.brekel.com/

Also interesting Eye Tracker add on for Kinect:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/4tiitoo/nuia-eyecharm-kinect-to-eye-tracking

harrysam

Yes I have tried it. Purchased the Pro version of it a few days ago for Windows. I would not recommend it to anyone at this point. It is really Alpha-Beta level software. The only thing that seemed to work reasonably well was upper torso arm gestures. Walking is terrible, whether from the front or from the side. It seemed to have a really hard time capturing and understanding any forward leg movement. If you raised your foot or legs to the side, it saw that, but not standard locomotion.

The reason I labeled it Alpha-Beta software is that a lot of things are missing/unpolished. Some of the menus are in French, and there is no Language setting to rectify this. It's ok for me because I speak French, but if you don't its a pain, not that the function being described is complicated enough really to matter. The biggest issue is that there is no way to calibrate the Kinect sensor, so you are stuck with whatever it happens to register. Also, the dummy has no joint constraints built in, so as you move to your computer to try and calibrate floor height or sensitivity, it often confuses the dummy. I had my legs literally facing backwards on the dummy several times, arms, hideously twisted and disjointed, etc. There is no way I could find just to reset the dummy to base position. So the only way to go was to try and load a new animation. Most times, this resulted in the program just crashing. Also there really wasn't a way to edit portions of your animation and throw out the bad bits, even though its supposed to have this function.

Caveats. Maybe somewhere, the guys who built this have a manual of how to fix/correct the issues I've described, but I could not find it. There isn't even a tutorial for Windows when you click the training links. The website is very shiny, but when you click on most links there is a lot of "coming soon". I only bought the Pro version because it purports to work with Daz and a number of other 3d programs, but lo and behold, even that feature doesn't "yet" work. I feel like a lot of the capabilities were very much misrepresented on the website. I have tried the Mocap plugin for iclone and that is miles above this thing in capability and function. The only issue with it is exporting animations. You really have to have the iClone 3DXchange v5.0 PRo and Pipeline to make it work easily with Daz and that is serious dough.

There is a reason fastmocap has no trial product, because if you trialed it you would never buy it. At least the Windows version I tried.

GnotMe

Thanks very much for your detailed review !

Dan