Motion Capture workshop with the students from SAE Institute

Motion Capture workshop with the students from SAE Institute

Last Thursday, the students from the Digital Film Animation Program of SAE Institute Geneva came to our studio for a great workshop on motion capture.
After 5 hours of theoretical lectures, the students were able to discover our motion capture studio and get their hands on our Vicon system.

The first step was to learn how to calibrate properly the system: camera parameters adjustment, reflections, wand wave and finally setting up the origin of the system. Once this was done, they quickly dressed up and started to position the reflective markers on the actors. Care was taken not to forget one!
The next step was to calibrate the actors. A range of motion was first captured and then processed to fit a virtual skeleton to the performers. Last check: no marker is missing, reconstruction is fine, the labeling and the solve is ok… Good! Now let’s capture something!

During the afternoon, a few movements were captured and then post-processed. The students were also able to preview in real-time their animation in Motion Builder. A lot of fun but also a nice way to check how the actor performance will be transposed to a 3D character.

Motion capture courses Motion capture courses

Motion capture demo reel

Here is artanim’s new motion capture demo reel. Discover our facilities and motion capture systems!

Taekwondo and tango movements were captured using our 24 cameras Vicon system. Rock climbing and mountain bike were tracked with our Xsens MVN suit.

Special thanks to Valerie, Sina, Etienne and Houmi for their participation.

Open day

Open day

Artanim is pleased to invite you to its open day:

Saturday 24th of September 2011 from 10am to 5pm

Artanim is dedicated to the development and promotion of motion capture. We conduct research projects in computer animation and biomedicine, educational activities and cultural activities such as the creation of audiovisual projects and events.

We will present our different motion capture systems:

  • Vicon: 24 MXT40S cameras, 110m2 studio
  • Xsens: MVN suit allowing outdoor capture session

To help us cater for the correct number of visitors, we would be grateful if you could contact us to let us know your company name and number of people in your party.

Our team looks forward to meeting you and will be pleased to answer any of your questions!

Installation of our Vicon system

Installation of our Vicon system

Last week, Prophysics came to our studio in order to install our Vicon system: 3 MX Giganets, 24 MXT40S cameras!

The first day was dedicated to build the system that came packed into several boxes (see photo on the left). 16 cameras were first attached to the two flexible grids and 8 others were mounted on tripods.

The next day, the Prophysics’s technicians carefully calibrated each camera to obtain the biggest motion capture volume as possible while maintaining high tracking accuracy (see photo below). We finally tested the system intensively with different sizes of markers to ensure its proper setup, and especially to make sure we can precisely capture the smallest eyebrow movements, as well as incredible fast and large range of motion!

Vicon system calibration