Motion capture lessons

Having completed the tutorials set during the motion capture particles I felt it would be beneficial to book the motion capture room with a group of people are try and capture some takes ourselves.  

Session one:

Ground plane issues; In this session we set up the camera’s correctly and calibrated them using the wand, we also placed the markers on the performer correctly following the tutorial guide. The problem occurred during this session as the ground plane wasn’t set correctly. We couldn’t go back and rectify our problem as we hadn’t set/saved the project properly. We were running the files to a USB stick instead of the D drive. Therefore the VSS files where not being created properly and blade started to crash.  

Session Two:

Labelling issues; learning from the previous week we followed the tutorial guide in order to save the files correctly. We set the project and created new session files. We did manage to capture some movement, however when we created the labelling setup the labelling labelled the markers wrong. The labels ended up on the opposite sides so the left was on the right and the right was on the left and some markers ended up not being picked up by the cameras. Therefore some of them hadn’t been labelled at all.  

After a lot of confusion and some help of various people we discovered that we had set everything up correctly however it was a technical fault. We could have labelled them by hand recreating the labelling set up correcting the mistakes, however we felt it would be very time consuming and time spent doing that could be spent retaking a clean shot.

Here you can see that the legs are crossed over and the arms are up in the air due to the incorrect labelling.

Lessons learnt so far.  

DO NOT run your blade files from a USB as this will cause blade to crash and VSS files will not be created properly there for you will not be able to access the motion capture data.  

Setting the ground plane properly; setting the ground plane properly is important as this is where the character is going to stand. Without the ground plane the character will not stand on the grid properly. To make sure the ground plane will collaborate properly you should reset the settings at the beginning of every take.