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Motion Capture Tests and Custom Headset

In the process of playing with Metahumans and looking for a cost effective way to do animation for my JRPG side project I've been looking at motion capture solutions. For the body, I evaluated Plask.ai, as I can't afford a rokoko or xsens suit right now, and for face tracking I've been using Unreal's live link.


My hope is to be able to capture body and face performance simultaneously, so I needed a head mount for my iPhone. Commercial ones are thousands of dollars so I built my own, I got a parts list online then tweaked it a bit and built my own lighting solution (doing some basic lighting for some model kits has meant I have the resources and ability to do simple electronics).

For a test run, I decided to recreate a scene from Fight Club. It was suggested to me by a friend but I really like the idea because it's delightfully meta playing both parts. I set up my green screens to try and give plask an easier time of capturing me and did a few takes. I didn't spend too long rehearsing because the quality of my performance wasn't really the point. I also need to revise the helmet as it didn't really hold up when I moved around too much (I needed to ditch it for one take). Given I'd really like to try doing some combat animations which include face animation for Metahumans (I think it'd be a cool marketplace niche) I really need to fix that.

Youtube and the Unreal docs were pretty vital for getting the plask animations and the live link animations onto the metahumans, to be safe I used a standard mannequin in the middle in of the pipeline. Retargeting proved difficult and I fumbled around with it for a while but I eventually got the animations onto the metahumans. However, I'm still fighting with control rig for cleaning up the plask body capture (and it really needs it).

Unfortunately, I was blocking out of the sequence and had both Metahumans running body and face animations when Unreal crashed and that project now can't open without crashing. So I may need to start the process again.


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