We’ve already seen one way Microsoft’s Kinect can be used to help bedroom game developers, but here’s another, more exciting one: it can allow for home-grown motion capture.
For professionals, motion-capture work is time-consuming, highly specialised and expensive. Indeed, it’s one of the big reasons Rockstar’s LA Noire has been so long in development.
This Kinect hack, though, makes it a relative breeze, turning Kinect’s own motion-recognition powers in on itself and using them to generate animated models. It taps into professional mo-cap software MotionBuilder and just dumps all the data right in there, in real time.
You may not get results worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster, but if all you want to do is have some basic characters or models looking more realistic – whether for a game or even just animated project – this could do the trick (provided the creator sees fit to continue working on the project, at any rate!).
Realtime Kinect skeleton device for MotionBuilder [Thanks Geoff!]
Leave a Reply