Kinect V2 mocap coming to MH Blender add-on

Works in progress and technical screen shots.

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Kinect V2 mocap coming to MH Blender add-on

Postby jcpalmer » Wed Jan 03, 2018 4:09 pm

Sort of a per-announcement that I am making considerable progress toward motion capture of multiple bodies using a Kinect V2 direct from Blender. I have also made significant improvements in IK rigs. Have not made the Default skeleton IK capable (except for finger rig), but the KinectV2 skeleton is, and you can keep the facial bones. The Game Rig is IK capable as before, but now IK rigs can also be reversed with a click.

I am now building two, 125kb DLL's (x86 & x64 versions) to send JSON formatted bone position / rotation back to a python callback every frame. When the 'Stop' button was clicked, I am successfully taking the frame info that was being put aside and generating an action for each bodies the device detected (up to 6). The results are currently horrific, but I am starting to get a handle on changing that.

I have seen that I am not taking the best advantage of this multiple body tracking. To do that, I need to separate the completion of the session from assignment of "parts" to different meshes. Examples of bringing up lists of foreign data, something called a UIList are basically non-existent. Have put up a question on blender stack exchange, but on way or another I'll resolve this.

Finally, to set some expectations you are going to need:
  • Windows 7 / 8 / 10
  • USB 3.0
  • A Kinect V2 (V1) will not work
  • A Kinect adapter for PC / XBox One
  • Kinect runtime redistributable (will put in the Github repo)
One the hardware front, these sensors are very well built. They stopped manufacturing them in October, but millions were made. I got one on eBay for $40 used.

The adapter splits the sensor's combo power / data cable into a USB 3.0 & power-supply / wall plug.

I do not really have a home for the Visual Studio C++ project source code yet. Mixing python & C++ in the same repo seems forced. This code could also used for any purpose that parses JSON, like Javascript.
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Re: Kinect V2 mocap coming to MH Blender add-on

Postby RobBaer » Thu Jan 04, 2018 1:29 am

This sounds really interesting. Keep us posted.
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Re: Kinect V2 mocap coming to MH Blender add-on

Postby jcpalmer » Thu Jan 04, 2018 4:38 pm

Hopefully, this can finished soon. Have fixed my animation list issue. This morning I also broke up the Panel into tabs. It was getting too long with all the new features. Here is the Kinect Tab:

kinectV2.jpg
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Re: Kinect V2 mocap coming to MH Blender add-on

Postby jcpalmer » Mon Feb 26, 2018 9:13 pm

I have not done anything with this in a couple of weeks. Once the C++ & corresponding python DLL loading was done, then it fell to actually using the data. It got ugly fast.

Just an FYI, I posted a topic to Blender Stack Exchange asking there. Should anyone here have any idea, let me know.
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