Home Made Motion Capture

 

This is an extended reply to Hugh Hancock’s comment to the “Up to your armpits in virtual space” post.

Yes, Gypsy looks great. It’s so simple.

Around the time I was starting in on Stolen Life I knew that eventually I wanted to do a machinima movie with human characters. Wouldn’t that be a novelty? I took a close look at the Gypsy motion capture system. As low cost as it is it’s still a ton of money to scrape together.

Being someone who loves to reinvent the wheel I seriously took on an attempt to make at least a partial motion capture system of my own taking a few tips from the Gypsy system. I took apart an old “ball” style mouse and connected a long leaver to the light wheel via a large pulley. I set up a virtual arm to match it in 3DGameStudio. For a while it looked like it might work. I’m sure I didn’t have any mechanical slippage in my system. The problem seemed to be in the electronics. The first swing was fine but with continued movement there was accumulative error and the zero start point of the virtual arm would drift further and further away from the arm in the physical world. The real showstopper was that windows XP unlike previous operating systems will only support one mouse. You can attach two but you can’t collect xy coordinates discreetly. So I put it all away in a box and got on with making Stolen Life.

Gypsy
http://www.animazoo.com/