Having recently solved some of the last bits for my inverse kinematics engine, I've since gone ahead and purchased the beginnings of an optical hardware motion capture system. I'll post sometime soon on all of this, it's quite cool. But it had me thinking ahead on what I may need to do to get everything to work the way I intend to use it.
Now, not having the hardware here with me is a bit of an issue. For one, I can't learn it! And two, the little plugins and tools I've made can't be tested on its output either. I can only sit and wait for the main gear to arrive. But it had me wondering what I may be able to do before it gets here. Something I might be able to prepare in advance. And, I came up with something I thought would be a useful little tool. You see, the optical system comes with it's own software. And it tracks things in real time, including objects and skeletons. Since you can track props and objects, I thought I could make a plugin that would communicate with the motion capture software to get real time updates inside Cinema4D for an object.
Because I do my animation stuff in another DCC package (Cinema4D for now), it does leave me a little apprehensive on whether Cinema4D is up to the task here. But alas, we can only wait and see. For the mean time, I dug into the motion capture software SDK to see if I might be able to make a simple object tracker. What this means is, I can use the network to get motion tracked positional and rotational data out of their software, and into mine in real time. Which would be really neat because it means I could view real time object positioning inside Cinema4D.
So, my idea was to build a simple tool that polls the live tracking state of an object. Now, I've built the early beginnings of the tool (see the screen shot below). If you have another look at the hero image of this post, you'll also see a camera in a viewport surrounded by some green sphere markers. The tool lets you display the marker set from the motion capture around the object you're tracking. There's still a few things to add, and probably some I haven't accounted for yet. But it's a start.
However, I'm in the unfortunate position of not being able to test it because you have to have a license to the software in order to retrieve information from their software 'server'. If I'm being honest, I think that's pretty poor design. Large software packages should make their software so that developers can come along and do their thing without having to purchase a multi-thousand dollar license just to test it. Other packages have done this. Heck, even Cinema4D allows you to get a demo so you can do just that. But, anyway. As poor as their offerings are here, I'm stuck with it until my gear and license key arrives.
Still, it keeps me excited on all the things looking ahead. There's a raft of things I'm going to try and do with it. I know I can't see any of my tools in action on a project yet, but I'm etching ever so closer to it. Another 5-6 weeks and the gear should arrive. It'll be a bit of a learning curve, but it'll be fun to setup and use the first time. Even more so if I can get some of my tools to work alongside it. It may even be possible for my character animation tool ProxyMan to have a live skeleton link - wouldn't that be cool!!! Real time motion capture using my own tools.
Some good things to look forward to.