Summary

The Motion Capture team at NHTV is group of students who organize shoots for all projects requiring Motion Capture. We do this work for students as well as external clients. We provide 17-sensor body MoCap and facial MoCap with the technology available at school.

---

Technical Supervisor

As technical supervisor, I help maintaining the physical Motion Capture assets. This includes the laptops, receivers, but foremost the body suit and sensors.
We use the Xsens MVN Link body suit with 17 sensors, a full lycra body suit, transmission receivers and a license for MVN studio, which processes the MoCap transmissions.
The equipment is fully portable provided we use laptops, so we are not restrained to any room. We can fully set up the gear and equip an actor with the suit within 15 minutes.
Responsiblities include swapping the sensors between suits when a different suit size is required, set up pipelines for equipment setup / teardown and making sure all safety precautions to protect the sensors are exercised.

Data Processing

From MVN studio we can extract .FBX or .BHV which we can then process using Autodesk Motionbuilder.
The pipeline that we have learned to go through is as follows:
Raw Data > Retarget to skeleton > Characterize skeleton >  Skeleton to Control Rig > Apply cleanup filter > Crop useable animation > Centre animation.
After this we can add animations layers to craft the animation to the point that we need, and then export it to the engine as FBX.

Filtered walking animation before cropping and centering

Looped and centered walk cycle, usable in engine

Inside the suit

I've been inside the suit for various shots, getting practice in which type of moves require subtlety (low paced animatic shots) and which moves require more acted out motions (high paced shots, in-game usage)

Noteable projects

- The Red Stare - Actor & Technical Supervisor
- The Dancer Awakens - Technical Supervisor
- The Key Tax - Actor & Data processing
- The Survivors (WIP) - Actor & Data processing
- Cinematic for unannounced project (WIP) - Actor