3DS Max Friendly version of the Open Motion Capture Library!

[nbohr1more]

It looks like BloodRayne (from the Hexen EOC and Grimm mods) has found and successfully implemented

 

motion capture conversion to Doom 3 Anim formats.

 

Here is a youtube video:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0K9th4ehtE

 

 

Here is the Doom3 world topic:

 

http://www.doom3worl...t&sd=a&start=80

 

 

BVH formatted files (3DS Max friendly):

 

https://sites.google.com/a/cgspeed.com/cgspeed/motion-capture/3dsmax-friendly-release-of-cmu-motion-database

 

Tutorial:

 

http://www.mediafire.com/?rwizjzdyumt

Edited December 28, 2011 by nbohr1more

[Springheel]

Is this news? Oddity had motion capture working in TDM back in 2005.

[nbohr1more]

Not motion capture of itself.

 

There is a HUGE library of animations available for free from Carnegie Mellon University.

 

Until now, it was not in a Doom 3 friendly format.

[New Horizon]

That's pretty awesome...and the animations look rather nice ingame.

Looking at the list there are a lot of usable animations that could either replace or be used in addition to what we already have. Would certainly help in the area of a Doom 3 free TDM.

[Springheel]

You can't just apply motion capture to an existing rig, can you?

[nbohr1more]

BloodRayne used something called the "Biped Plugin" which apparently can map to Doom 3 models in a very similar fashion to the native Doom 3 rig.

 

Not sure if there are any measures you could take that would allow you to map to an existing rig though... Match the number of joints?

[Springheel]

Matching the joints would still require re-rigging all the AI and scrapping all our existing animations.

[nbohr1more]

Well that took some wind out of my sails

 

Shall I hold-out hope for the possibility of a new guard type, NPC, or ambient AI, who'd use these animations and rigs?

[Glyph Seeker]

D'oh! Well - well spotted nbohr - better to be on the lookout for these things than not.

[Springheel]

Shall I hold-out hope for the possibility of a new guard type, NPC, or ambient AI, who'd use these animations and rigs?

 

It would be FAR more work to create a new guard using a new rig and different animation set than it would to just use our existing ones. An ambient AI that is used for a specific, limited purpose is possible if someone with 3DS Max wanted to look into it.

 

Do they have any animal mocap? That's the one area I could see it being useful for us.

[SiyahParsomen]

It would be FAR more work to create a new guard using a new rig and different animation set than it would to just use our existing ones. An ambient AI that is used for a specific, limited purpose is possible if someone with 3DS Max wanted to look into it.

 

Do they have any animal mocap? That's the one area I could see it being useful for us.

 

yes!!

 

But with human subject. lol

[nbohr1more]

Hmmm...

 

Now that the source code is out, what about allowing more than one rig per entity or rig-swapping?

 

What say you Greebo, would this be a worthwhile endeavor?

[Springheel]

I can't even imagine how such a thing would be done.

[demagogue]

What I think we should take away from this is that it makes it relatively easier for mappers to come up with custom AI for their FMs.

 

I imagine if there's a library of open source mocap animations then there should be a library of open source rigged models out there ready to use them. I don't imagine they'd be a perfect fit for TDM in style, so not great to integrate in the mod as is. But for a mapper that wants a custom AI to do a specific thing in their FM, like just act out an animation & conversation for a scene, then we should refer them to this. It's going to really add to the storytelling to make it easy to do that... As long as those AI just perform their animation & don't have to get involved in the gameplay later (i.e., TDM specific animations), which I imagine would be a tougher thing to pull off.

[Arcturus]

I imported some animations to Blender. Skeleton loads, and animation plays properly, but I have no idea how to apply it to our models.

[Springheel]

It's going to really add to the storytelling to make it easy to do that..

 

Even just that much isn't as easy as it sounds. Beyond knowing 3DS Max and how to export models, you'd have to make a complete modeldef for the mocap rig, as well as a new entitydef for the AI, which will crash D3 if certain animations aren't present.

 

Or you'd have to run them as a func_animate, which has a large number of limitations.

 

I don't think this is particularly useful for us, unfortunately.

[Arcturus]

There's a tool in Blender 2.6 that helps apply .bvh animation to Blender's rig:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VhbSrau-0c&feature=related

 

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Benjycook/GSOC/Manual

[Arcturus]

With latest versions of Blender comes an incredible tool: motion tracking. Program can track points in a movie and then by comparing their relative positions in different frames it can recreate a virtual scene with camera moving just like the real one. With that you can create realistic special effects. Here's my attempt

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj8cJVfKLCE&list=UUODfDhGusu3dDBeRPQU7wsw&index=1&feature=plcp

 

You can not only "solve" a camera's movement but also movement of objects. So human motion capture without using expensive sensors is now theoretically possible in Blender. There are videos with facial mocap where trackers where used to run shape keys. But a skeletal animation should be possible. But of course you would need a costume with markers.

 

Here are some more videos (not mine):

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZalGrjGKSA

[Arcturus]

[Bikerdude]

those last 2 videos are bloody awesome!

[Baddcog]

Yeah rigging is easy, if I had a character model I could do that. I've requested an FBX of them before though (make this 5 times) so I could do some animations.

 

The hard part is building the af file. It's all done in Doom, You've got to make a bone for each bone you want then set the joint type and limitations. If anything goes wrong Doom crashes out. The hardest (re most confusing part) is getting the correct joints listed in the trees they belong in. I'd have to completely relearn that since it's been so long. Of course I have a few ai I could reverse engineer to help, but it's a pain.

 

We could always export the anims with the same names as existing ones, in so far as they have mocaps of similar anims.

 

There's always a chance the rig is the same. But not likely, there's bone #'s, placement, names...

[Arcturus]

Blender's motion capture addon should handle different positions and names automatically (as seen in video tutorial I posted). The thing is, our current rig is illogical. Here's the mocap rig:

 

 

And here's TDM:

 

 

So yeah, probably new skeleton would be needed. On the other hand I believe a custom motion capture could be used with our current rig.

[Springheel]

That looks horribly distorted.

[Baddcog]

Well, looks like we have one more clavical bone than they have.

 

The distortion is because our rig is probably mirrored, and on blender import those mirrors aren't holding, thus all the bones have flipped on their origins in at least two planes.

 

I don't think I can import md5 though Maya can export an FBX which I should be able to open just fine

[Arcturus]

I recall someone saying long time ago, that it's asymmetrical on purpose, to better see the bones during editing. After importing MD5mesh to Blender bones aren't connected. I connected them into chains to better show the problem. Here's imported marine from Doom: