Hi all,
I need to make some mocap for a project; specifically hand gestures.
What would you suggest as software, to accomplish this with a Xbox360 Kinect?
Leapmotion may be better for the task, but I am not planning to spend money to get one, just for this project.
I saw some videos on youtube about iPi studio, which looks nice; anyone tried it? I would like to hear some feedback about what did you use in your projects. I have only the kinect sensor; so it must work with that.
I don’t think you’ll be able to capture finger animation with a Kinect. Fingers are too small for it to resolve properly. (See this iPi Studio article about it.) You might need to go to Leap Motion if you need finger capture.
If by “hand gestures” you mean the hand (as a whole) relative to the position of the body, you can do this with a Kinect.
Are you looking for live runtime mocap or something to capture animations at design time that you can then assign to Mecanim, etc.?
For live capture, RF Solutions has some good wrappers for the Kinect/Open NI SDKs on the Asset Store, as well as Leap Motion stuff, much of which is free.
iPi Studio is pricey, but it’s more capable at the moment than Cinema Mocap. Cinema Mocap is appealing because it’s integrated directly into Unity, but it doesn’t support dual cameras so it can’t capture arms crossing in front of the body or the body turning more than about 40-60 degrees.
Either way, make sure to get the right adapter to hook up the Kinect to your computer. There are different adapters for the original Kinect and the Kinect 2.
Since finger mocap will probably require a good amount of manual cleanup anyway, you might consider manually keyframing the animation. Depending on the number of gestures, you could probably contract an animator on the Job Seeking forum for the same price as iPi Studio and get better results.
I see, so the resolution is too low then.
Sadly I need single finger movements; like when you use sign language basically; so I need to resolve not only the position of the hand as whole, but also the single fingers.
I am looking for any solution that my fit my case…ideally I was hoping to record with Kinect an animation file, and then just import it in Unity and assign it to a specific mesh. It is the first time that I try something similar, so I am not even sure what can be done and how to proceed. Real time recording, would be even better, but I feel that it may not be that simple.
I tried the demo of iPi, and it didn’t really impress me; the kinect was not even able to resolve simple animations like kicking and punching (one arm would just go crazy, just because the chest is covering the shoulder joint…I suppose you must be perfectly perpendicular to the sensor for optimal results). The resulting animation was not bad; considering that it was home made; I am not sure if that is the best software around, to record with the kinect.
The Kinect is connected via USB; I have the PC version so I have the AC adapter, which double as cable adapter 
I am amazed at how much we covered in the past years, and still we can’t get something like mocap for the whole body at reasonable price and with decent resolution I guess that hands will be the next step after face animation. I will give a try with keyframing; I do not have too much to animate, so that should be relatively quickly…otherwise I guess I need a Leap motion, just for that purpose (which should be able to record with good resolution, the fingers and hand movements I hope…is not that cheap after all )
Thanks!