Indie Vicon System Cost and Solo Operator Guide

i can still touch i could play with my mouse and keyboard i could type i could play the piano i could play the guitar pretty easily like this hello and welcome to the second episode of the second season of the virtual production vlog last episode i set up this lovely vikon motion capture system and then i blew my own mind with how incredible it looks when you're doing performance capture with metahumans so i'm re-recording this because i just got permission to talk about pricing like the number one thing that people are interested in is how much does this system cost do i have to sell x amount of organs or limbs or whatnot so i got the official word from vicon that i could give a ballpark price for how much this system costs so that you can start planning and saving your money so that you can do nice motion capture anyway i have again a 10 camera vero vicon indie mocap system and this pricing is roughly 50 000 usd so this is ballpark figure but i think that's enough for most people to get started uh the reason that they don't do or one of the main reasons they don't do like direct pricing on the website is because it's really different depending on what you're trying to do how big your space is how fast you're trying to capture how many people what type of actions are you like climbing up stairs like there's different parameters and they really need to custom fit the solution for you to make sure that you're like you actually get the cameras you need and have the stuff that will actually work for you you want to kind of consult with them before you buy it if you go and buy like hey let's just buy these ones because that's what we saw that might be the wrong system and it's not the way to approach kind of like a bigger enterprise system purchase whatever like like a vicon so roughly my system is about fifty thousand dollars u.s i'm allowed to say that so everyone can kind of plan accordingly and and see if that makes sense for you and for the even more indie people uh indie game developers in the virtual production indie v tubers uh academics as well you can get away with less cameras depending on what you're doing so you want to talk to them about be like hey i'm like an indie game dev or like i wanted to use this for v tubing this is the space i'm in there are configs that are smaller that may cost less something like six cameras that's something that i can kind of test out eventually here i don't really want to take down any of my cameras because i'm very happy with those results right now why would i want to make it slightly perhaps worse but you might be able to get away with smaller amounts of cameras but i just wanted to put that out there because that is the number one question because everyone looks at it and it's like well that looks incredible how much is this costing there's the official answer and go forth with that let's continue the virtual production vlog um but what i want to do today for this vlog is kind of go through like the daily operation of this thing like a day in the life of like a motion capture technician and performer and kind of like a mocap uh kind of like content creator running this whole thing solo i think a lot of people think that optical mocap which is what this is called the style like lots of cameras looking at us um a lot of people have the impression that like it's too complicated to run by yourself and it takes lots of people to do that so generally optical mocap volumes are really big there's lots of cameras um there's lots of performers in them and so in those cases that is really complicated it does require a lot of people but what is probably less familiar to people are the much smaller mocap volumes and what you're looking at here this is pretty much the smallest it could be i mean you could go a little bit smaller and maybe focus on just desk and hands and stuff like that but generally for a full body like vicon optical motion capture volume studio this is as small as it gets and i just want to show you that it is possible to run it with just one person i guess this would be two just one person and i'll just show you like overall what does this look like to turn the system on calibrate things what is the suit like when you put it on etc etc just to show how it all works right so before i turn on the cameras and the software what now i just want to go over really quickly what optical mocap is in a very general sense so what we have here is a marker and it's nothing special this is not an active marker there's no electronics in it it's not flashing light this is a squishy squishy ball that has reflective tape on it that's all it is it's very lightweight and you know if you watch the first vlog you'll see that we have 10 cameras just all around us looking back and they're looking for these little balls here so these are ir cameras i believe so if you look at the vikon camera again from the first vlog you'll see it up close they're shooting at like something like 120 frames per second like ir light into this area and that ir light is going to reflect really really strongly off of this so that these cameras just see really bright white dots that's all they see and if three cameras can see one dot they can triangulate where they think it is in the 3d world it's position right uh and so you take a bunch of these and you have a lot of cameras looking at looking at them and it can construct where those are in 3d space and from that it will do all sorts of things like say hey that's a box like that over there which you'll see what that kind of looks like or in the case of a human performance capture lots of these all over the human body it's like oh that's a person and so generally very high level again that's that's that's what's happening with optical mocap there's a lot more into it but just that is a fundamental to understand is that all of these cameras are looking for these dots so we have to do some things to allow that to happen i just wanted to go over that really quickly optical mocap means ir cameras are looking for dots in 3d space basically okay so to calibrate the system we're going to use this which is a lightsaber it's a it's a wand it reminds me of like the double lightsaber from kylo anyway you have this uh wand here and it has these uh however many were five we're counting here early in the morning we have these five leds and these will basically show up to the cameras uh the ir cameras up there very similar to how these markers will show up so to vicon this t formation is a known dimension and when it sees it it's like i know what that is that's the one this is one v2 also and so what we're going to do is first thing in the morning we're going to take this wand we're going to go stand in the middle of our capture volume and then we're going to start spinning this thing around you do like figure eights and what you're literally doing is painting in 3d space if you've ever done like a vr painting game you're pretty much doing that and the goal is to have every camera um look at this position move it around and you're trying to like literally paint up the field of view in 3d space of each camera and it just basically it does all that we just move this thing around and kind of paint in 3d space just fill the whole volume with 3d light trails essentially and when that's done it's going to be calibrated after you get the system calibrated we now need to set the origin and also the orientation like what's the front of this thing right of this volume and the way we do that is we take this same wand and we put it on where you want the center of the stage to be and unreal engine that's where your pen is 0 0 0 will be if you've done this kind of stuff before and i place mine right on this little plus sign back here and i face it this way because i'm always performing towards my computer which is directly behind me so i can see what's going on i can i can see what's going on because i'm solo normally like computers would be the other way and someone's like someone else is looking at it but for me solo operator i face my origin towards my computer screen so i can see what's happening so once we've placed this on the ground uh everything will be right side up and it'll look normal and you can see all of the 3d cameras in shogun you can see all the little marks where they think they are in 3d space and you are pretty much set to go the last thing that we do as i turn this off is to make sure that the floor is flat because like if this is not always level especially on a carpet what we do is we're going to take four of these markers and we're going to put them on the floor kind of in like any position just as long as the cameras can see it and then we select those in shogun and we say set floor and it's going to you know take those and kind of average them out and say like this is the this is the floor of this volume right so just make sure that things are really flat or at least they match your floor because you know if you're in like a warehouse or something like that those floors are not flat there might be a little bit of a little bit of a slant and so this takes that into account uh so this might be a long video but i want to show you what it looks like to get suited up for a vicon system and just kind of show you where the markers are on it because i feel like there's not a lot of content about that and i just want to show people you know what are we wearing when we're doing a vlog on so one second okay so these are the two main things here it's a little bit dark but basically um you're going to have like a shirt and it's a separate shirt with like a zip up i'm gonna put it on and then you have pants and yeah they're tight but they're they're pretty comfortable and uh you know if you're not comfortable wearing something in the skin tight then join the club but this is what you need to wear so i'm going to hop into these and kind of show you what they look like okay so i don't know if you can tell or not because i wear black all day anyway but i'm wearing the pants now like this they've got little uh strappies so they kind of stick like this and they're pretty tight overall uh we basically have markers it's kind of dark in here isn't it but we basically have markers on both sides of the knee one on my thigh one on my like lower leg and then two on my ankles so there's a lot we have a lot of tracking points that's why this is so good we have a lot of data coming in to solve our human skeleton so we put this one on next uh this is the shirt i really do like that they're separate uh the shirt and the pants because like i'll kind of take them off to do work and then put them back on so i don't have to wear the whole suit like the whole time but this zips up like this it's like a wetsuit it's pretty tight and then there's these little straps at the end here and they just go like this so that you know this stays nice and tight here similar to the knees we have some trackers on this side of the elbow this side then one on the forearm one in the upper arm three on the uh chest here kind of like the front of the shoulders here then this one which these are just velcroed on uh this one goes in the middle then we have one in the middle chest and then one here three in the front like a belt basically uh so again a lot of markers uh but you saw how i put them on i just leave them on the suit and i only kind of move around uh these ones because the zipper is here and it mostly works you know if you're like professional you would do it every time but it's been working out pretty fine for me and i'm looking for something that's like kind of easy on the back i think i have three here spine it is here and then three on the shoulder so that's it you know you kind of if you're if you're solo which is probably rare but if you're a solo vicon user you pretty much put the dots on you and you're good to go um you can just put the suit back on and all you have to move are these three and vikon is really good and if the markers are like slightly off it'll stew it'll still do a really good job the next thing here are the shoes which these are kind of fun these are actually just like regular sneakers and you get these foot covers so it's basically just like a skin a wrap that goes around whatever shoes you want to wear which is nice you get to be you know pick the shoes that you're comfortable with and uh we're going to stick markers on the toe on the sides of where like the toe bends essentially right you can see like the kind of joint it would be making and then the back like that and so i have this on two different shoes these are like adidas like slip-ons because i don't wanna have to tie my shoes uh and i basically just i'll do it back here and i'm like 95 of the way there check out my check out this haircut that's about to happen here be be unleashed into the world uh the final thing is your head i'm like bent over because i don't feel like moving my camera right now you get this uh this cap here right so if you're not going to capture face data which i pretty much always do uh you can actually just wear just this just like a you know a stretchy thing and you put the markers on the head on this directly but the one you really need is at the top but you're going to see i'm going to wear i'm going to wear a special one for doing face smoke app oh yes now i'm wearing the full no cap look here uh but there's one on the top of my head and then the pista resistance here is uh is this this is a standard deviation hmc so it's not a full helmet i actually have a technoprops one which i'll probably make another video about now that i'm doing a lot of mocap content lately um and so this one you can go buy i don't remember the price i think it's like around a thousand us something like that but uh you will try a lot of different things when it comes to mounting iphones to your head for performance capture and they will all lead to pain and you will eventually come to this solution so i'm just telling you right now this is a really good one i do have if you can see it real close it kind of i do have a sanken cause 11d it's like a really nice uh lavalier mic is just kind of taped on here and then uh the cable safety so that when i pull on the cord which inevitably happens it doesn't rustle this because like the enemy of a system like this would be like any any touching or rubbing would would be very very loud so this is my standard deviation setup for now uh i am always looking for a new facial mocap uh helmets cameras rigs uh there's definitely room to improve with the iphone but to get started for me the iphone is really easy especially with that humans but i am on the hunt for something much better uh in the future okay so i'm gonna actually kneel down so this thing just kind of goes around your head like this the back of it is cupping my head right now and i crank it and aren't we in quite the quite the outfit at the moment and so we have two markers in the front two in the back i had to velcro them to this thing and then one on the top okay so one last part i forgot is the hands and that's because there's a lot of different ways of approaching hands and i'm still working through the different options that i have available to me but i'll show you what i've been using lately that is purely vicon so let me write one second so we basically have these gloves here and i'll put i'll put them on uh there are many different ways to approach um hand mocap like how many markers you use and what kind of fidelity you're gonna get oops that's backwards but uh this is the one i have now and this is the most minimal right the less the least invasive right so we have the glove here it's just velcro and cloth and this thing wraps around to kind of tighten it on and that's it that's that's all we're going to wear here so we have a marker on each side of the wrist and then we have two markers on the knuckles and this is the minimum thing you need to give to vicon to say for it to know like hey this is which way your hand is right so this is actually tracking your hand and your wrist clearly not tracking any fingers but this is like the most minimal way of doing it and you'll just get flat hands like this which then you would clean up in post or if it's live you would just give it in unreal engine like some sort of like kind of neutral pose that's not like like this but this is great because uh if you're doing like flips or something like active uh you don't have to wear like full gloves which can kind of get in the way and you still have touch so if you're like live streaming and v-tubing and the hands really are not the focus you could easily still play video games like this and have your actual fingers out which is really nice and have some sort of ham stuff but this is like the most minimum hands you can have here anyway so the first type of uh finger tracking we can do with vicon is called three finger tracking and one way to approach this is to take these nine millimeter trackers here they're on like kind of rubber bands with holes in them uh it works and what you're going to do is you're going to basically put one on your thumb let's get this on here kind of flop this through here like this you can cut off the slack especially if you like know your thumb size i've just been leaving it for now then you're going to take one and you're going to put it on your ring finger like this at the knuckle so we got two now then we're gonna put one on our pinky like this spin this jam around and it doesn't take very long so this is three finger tracking and this is the from the demos you'll you've seen me do uh this week anyway this allows you to have open hand and kind of a closed hand it doesn't really make it to a fist and you can kind of point but it does two fingers and it's basically gonna it's more or less gonna average what your hand is doing the thumb is fairly accurate even with just this one single point but it gives you just a little bit of hand difference here it's like a little bit closed open a little bit of flex not a ton but enough to give it so that the hands aren't just like like you know flat paddle hands the whole time so we'll put on the other ones but there it is there's like the very minimal three finger tracking you still have touch it's all very light like i it's you don't wear like if you've ever won mo ever worn mocap gloves they're a little a little heavy a little stretchy and tight this is still pretty much like your hands however i'm still going to switch to custom gloves which will have to be for the next vlog so this will give you some options for hands uh you still would clean it up or it would be like kind of like a loose live stream we're like okay still a little bit of hand movement and what they have which i'll show later when i get my gloves is that you can then do a ten finger track where you basically put these on all the ends of the fingers and your thumbs and then you have i think like one more mid finger so you have a lot of markers on your hands and then you get like full finger tracking and if you've ever seen like the vikon demo they did american sign language like it's really accurate however with these little strappies not very good so again i bought gloves and i'm gonna glue these onto the gloves so that'll have to be the next demo you can also of course use manus gloves or stretch dance gloves or even rococo gloves i can even use index controllers whatever you want but you can also which i i wasn't aware of until i started talking with vicon you can get pretty good live hand data with just these amount of markers right here this is pretty good for me when i'm live streaming with this or just doing kind of like you know loose videos i'm very happy with this very minimal setup like this okay so i am suited up and the next thing you typically do is hop into the volume uh but what you're typically gonna do is start by going into an a pose and this pretty much teaches shogun like okay uh when this character or this person is performing like this is how big their forearm is this is how big their whatever this thing is is how tall they are right it's basically taking on body measurements for you by looking at these markers and then it's going to recreate a skeleton that is actually like pretty much perfectly your size and so you basically get to do that by going like this doing an a pose and it'll register this point cloud of dots as an actual skeleton and that skeleton like i said is the same size as you after that we need to teach the system how i move as a person it's called the range of motion so what you're typically going to do is start by going like this then you do arm circles you're going to bend your wrists bend these here you go up spin like this we're going to go down and it's pretty much up to you but you basically want to hit the extremes of all the different like angles your body is going to hit and you're teaching again vicon through this recorded range of motion test here how you move right um everyone moves differently and if you're different heights your legs are going to bend differently when you're walking and whatnot and so this is basically custom tailoring the skeleton the tracking skeleton and ultimately the solving skeleton to say this is how big the performer is and this is how the performer moves and it uses all that data when it's doing the final solve so that's pretty much the whole process um you know i come down here turn on the system calibrate it we shake the wand out it's a good workout it's kind of fun get that calibrated um going to set the origin again set the floor put the suit on takes like a minute it's it's pretty pleasant compared to other mocap suits where like they're a one piece it's a little bit harder to get on actually a little bit more restrictive too um turn on the batteries for like my lavs and that's it you just jump right into the volume uh shogun picks up on you it's like yep okay you starts moving it around and the second part that i didn't show is that i then stream that to unreal engine so vikon shogun has a plug-in for under legend through live link and you literally just have one node and an animation blueprint that says live link from shogun and that's it um there's some retargeting that has to happen which i haven't shown either that's on the shogun software side it's actually like the one of the secret powers of shogun is how it does this very special retargeting it's part of the reason that my many human feet stick to the ground so well etc um but then that just becomes normal on real engine virtual production stuff as far as the shogun side it's really not that bad once it's all up and running i just come down here put on the suit and it's not a lot of mental burden i just start moving around and i start thinking about like creatively what i want to get done so as a solo creator once it's set up it's just about being creative and moving and as you've seen or in this video and hopefully the other one when you move with the vikon motion capture solve it's so accurate that like for me like nine times out of ten that's the final animation right if i'm gonna do this for game animations which i'll show later because i am going to use this stuff for like cine tracer where it has to be a little bit more precise i will record this to take recorder and then i can film it from different angles or use that 3d you know animation data in an actual game but when i'm v-tubing and making linear content i can basically live stream this stuff and it looks that good live and that is a higher quality live full body tracking than most people have or show on the internet and it's definitely good enough i would say that it's many generations beyond good enough i was very happy with my steamvr vtuber uh but with the meta humans you know they they really do well with a very realistic full body solve and that is what vicon provides for me but uh that wraps it up for this video let me know in the comments uh if you want to see something specific you have questions about it uh if you have a question about it i probably do too and um i will find it for you to the best of my ability and try to show it uh while i'm in this phase of like discovering optical mocap working with metahumans it's very exciting for me hopefully this for you too and yeah any questions you have i think we all probably have the same one okay i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Cinematography Database

Views: 9,844

Keywords: cine tracer, cinetracer, unreal engine, ue4, previz, previs, virtual production, virtual cinematography, vicon, motion capture, optitrak, performance capture, metahuman, indie vicon

Id: YgT6XY6ldj8

Length: 24min 25sec (1465 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 17 2021