In collaboration with Alain Renaud from MINTLab, we gave on the 20th of April a workshop at Electron Festival in Geneva. At this occasion, we presented the 3D In Motion (3DIM) experimental setup of capture, visualization and sonification of movements in real time. About twenty people participated to the workshop, where they had the opportunity to test the system and to learn more about the underlying techniques.
It was the first time 3DIM was officially presented to the public and the feedback was positive. This gave us a good basis for further developing the system both in terms of visualization and musicality. The next demonstration will take place in June at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) Conference in London.
So you have an animation and simulation project, and want to scan people to get their high-resolution 3D meshes. At that point you have wide variety of different options based on different capture technologies, big bulky machines, hand-held devices and scanners that can take quite a while to obtain a scan. So what do you do when you don’t necessarily have a lot of permanent space, when you ideally want to obtain a scan in a single shot, and you want to do all that on a budget? Well, you build your own solution of course.
You visit your local camera vendor, and empty their basket of 64 Canon Powershot A1400 cameras, which should suffice to build 8 portable 3D scanning poles. Throw in a significant amount of USB cables, add some USB hubs, grab some wood and hardware from your local DIY store, add some bright LED strip for lighting, and you have all the ingredients necessary to build your own scanner.
Being the efficient people that we are, the idea of having to charge and replace the batteries for 64 individual cameras at each session did not sound like the most effective solution. So external power it is. Unfortunately the official adapter comes at a cost. And with us not being all that patient when it comes to seeing results of our labour, an ordering time of several weeks made us wonder “If we’re building the whole thing ourselves, surely we can make our own external power supplies as well”. And as soon as we have such thoughts, a “battery” assembly line springs to life, wiring up the wooden batteries and soldering the power-supply connectors.
The construction:
On the software side the Canon Hack Development Kit (CHDK) allows us to control all 64 cameras using custom scripts. With all cameras pretty much synchronized, we don’t have to worry too much about minor movements of the scanned subject, as long as the shutter time is fairly short. The actual capture process has completed in the blink of an eye. Processing the captured images into a 3D mesh and a clean texture uses Agisoft PhotoScan software, and requires only minimal manual tweaks. For animation some additional cleanup and remeshing might be necessary in other software, but the raw results obtained are already very detailed and usable.
And there you have it. Eight very portable and storable scanning poles, allowing us to capture bodies or objects at a sufficiently high resolution and in a short time.
Last week, we were invited at the Winter Enrichment Program (WEP) 2014, a three weeks of compelling educational, cultural and recreational events organized by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia). There, we did a 3 half day workshop on Motion Capture and 3D animation for the students of KAUST. Participants had the chance to test our Xsens MVN system and to follow a course on the challenges related to Mocap and 3D character modeling/animation through case studies and practical examples. According to students feedback, they really enjoyed the workshop!
Also, we participated to the Science Fun Fair, an opportunity for the community and schools from Saudi Arabia to come and learn about the science at KAUST. At this occasion, we did motion capture demos and showed several videos about our latest projects.
Yesterday, we tested with Tobias Baumann, game designer and freelancer, the Oculus Rift with our Xsens MVN in Unity 3D. The goal was to virtually hit columns of cubes and balloons. Some simple applications to start with, but resulting in a nice full-body immersive VR experience. The first tests were convincing. We will definitely continue working on this topic with Tobias. Stay tuned!
Sochi 2014 – the next Winter Olympic Games – is coming soon… For us, it was the opportunity to motion capture several winter sports! Indeed, we were contacted by Kenzan Technologies for the making of a 3D animation requiring different short captures of professional athletes. We spent a weekend in Zermatt to acquire the necessary data. The weather conditions were not on our side, -15° at the top, snow falls, zero visibility, not really the best conditions to go skiing with our Xsens system and a computer on the slopes! After experiencing a lot of issues, especially because of the cold, we were finally able to obtain good animation data during the weekend. We captured four athletes in the following disciplines: Nordic skiing, alpine skiing, freestyle skiing and snowboard.
Back in Geneva, we captured three additional people to complete our sample of winter sports: ice hockey, speed skating and bobsleigh. Now you are wondering… Is there a bobsleigh slope in Geneva? Well of course, there isn’t! But with some tricks, a good carpenter and a little practice, it is possible to produce the illusion… Note that for this last capture, it was not necessary to have a professional athlete!
So you have an animation and simulation project, and want to scan people to get their high-resolution 3D meshes. At that point you have wide variety of different options based on different capture technologies, big bulky machines, hand-held devices and scanners that can take quite a while to obtain a scan. So what do you do when you don’t necessarily have a lot of permanent space, when you ideally want to obtain a scan in a single shot, and you want to do all that on a budget? Well, you build your own solution of course.
