What mocap system should I buy? (2022)

people been asking me woody what mocap suit should i buy should i get a rococo should i get a vibe tracker should i get it yeah um maybe maybe you should and maybe i know which one so we're gonna get into it all of it every mocap question it's like it's all going down today baby all right so first off let's talk about our target audience right so you can pay anything for mocap right like you can buy uh dollar store mocap you can spend a thousand dollars on mocap you can spend fifty thousand dollars on mocap or more so here's the thing this list is for people who are like sort of getting into it like this list is for people who are interested in joining this weird world of virtual production and v tubers and all of that stuff right so and we're going to talk about the pros and cons of using certain specific methods for specific projects so just to get started like i'm going to break down like as many mocap systems i'm familiar with which is a lot i'm not going to be touching a higher end optical bass tracking mocap you should follow citizen meta one if you wanna see what that's all about he uh last year late last year i think put together a crazy vicon rig and did all sorts of crazy like full body motion capture that was all incredibly tastefully done super good so we're gonna be not talking about that stuff we're gonna be talking about stuff you can buy right now that will increase your ability to motion capture so my first question is what are you doing and why do you need a mocap suit um i'm not questioning whether you do need a mocap suit some people maybe do some people maybe don't there's some people who get a little bit too into this for me it was kind of a gateway drug faux flame has a great video where she talks about mocap and like she gets into who should get a mocap stupid who doesn't need one for v tubers i don't think everyone needs a mocap suit but for developers they're super helpful and for anyone working in animation i would recommend you know at least having something of your own to speed up the process if you will so there's like a couple of different ideal mocap suit users right there's uh people doing game animation stuff like triggerable animations for a game like battle animations and stuff like that although there's a lot of marketplace content for that out there already that's a thing if you want to do that there are people who are making full-on animations there are people who want to do v-tubing which is like what i'm doing right now which is like being live we're going to talk a lot about full body motion capture but we're also going to talk about sort of this like improvised mid-body motion capture right now i'm using live link face and i'm using my leap motion hand tracker and i'm actually not wearing any mocap equipment after coven in 2022 the chips are down literally literal chips literal microprocessors uh it's hard to get them right now so the countries that make those have had lockdowns and things shortened production there's a backlog of orders to be made people are trying to get chips and everybody is trying to get them and everyone's having trouble there's a lot of mocap companies who need electronics components right now and it can be really hard to get those electronics components so keep that in mind some of the companies we're gonna talk about have been hit harder than others there are some safer bets than others in 2022 unfortunately that's just that's a thing so we want to talk about a robust motion capture solution so we want to be able to live stream to a game engine like unreal or unity we want something that can also record stuff though if you've been following my work closely you'll know that we can use anything as motion capture and unreal through take recorder as long as we're not you know running the the tape out on take recorder all day and then let's also talk about ease of use right to me the best mocap system is the mocap system that you are able to use quickly because trust me like if you're someone like me who has trouble eventually like sort of getting to what they need to do like the mocap suit actually can sometimes encumber you and make it harder for you to go stream if you're using this v tuber which is like something nobody talks about so our ideal mocap system uh can live stream can record is easy to use and also is attainable like we can actually buy it so i want to talk about suits versus sensors which is they all have sensors it's everything is sensors right but i'm talking about suits versus optical general notes on suits um most people are selling suits limited to a specific body size a lot of times you could change the sensors out on those suits specific suits are fitted for certain bodies and that's like sort of a pain if you're trying to use multiple mocap actors and you're trying to use the same suit that's a problem battery life is a huge factor with a lot of the stuff that goes for more than just suits on this list obviously upper end mocap solutions like the vicon and stuff you don't have to worry about that everything's plugged in or it's not even electronic lastly i want to talk about inertial motion capture and that's an important word if you don't know it already inertial motion capture means that the suit is not running off of world data the suit is doing relative math between itself and like the different points on the body to be able to figure out where it is in 3d space so like this most of the suits are inertial sometimes they have accelerometers sometimes they have magnetometers magnetometers are important and we'll definitely talk about that magnetometers are tricky because they're based on proximity towards metals based on the sensor's proximity to the other sensors suits in general are not as accurate as an optical mocap solution they can be set up to be more convenient and they are more portable that's huge they are way more portable than a optical solution it's which is something to really think about so i want to start with rococo because i feel like they are the cool kid at the party i like rococo i think they're a really cool company there's like reasons for me to not think that which i want to talk about too because i really want to be honest about my experience with these i should say nobody's sponsoring this video it's just me in my opinions i have not received any money from anyone to do any kind of mocap so rococo is how i got started with v tubing in a way it was the first time i could take data into the computer and look at what was happening with the mocap in real time technically my first ever mocap shoot was done with the microsoft connect but that thing sucks and you should just use it for video games that you got in 2012. so rococo has really great advertising like rococo is really shiny and their stuff is awesome like you look at their website it's all very very wonderful and cool so i think a lot of for a lot of people there's like a lot of shine with them and i think that's fine like that's really good like they're making a product they do a really good job of promoting it my favorite thing about rococo overall is that they are such a positive and productive member of the cg community like they're always doing different competitions and ways for you to get involved and they give away mo caps sometimes they just give away money i got my rococo suit in 2020 which i feel like was before a lot of people although technically i think they've been around since 2017 their whole company started with a kickstarter so like initially everything was great i got rococo before i even knew there were v tubers i had like sort of thought about the idea of being a virtual version of myself like i had thought about it but i didn't know that they existed yet and for the most part rococo stuff worked for me early on so like early on in the product life i had a node go bad on my head and they had to send me a new cable to connect that node that actually happened twice i think there was at least four times that i had node points on the sensors break and lock the joint digitally so like when i was moving around i was unable to like translate entire joints sometimes which is not great however customer service was able to help me usually getting me a couple new cables now currently i'm at a spot where i have like a specific joint point that doesn't seem to be accepting cables as a solution to be able to like help solve the problem which i'm a little bit frustrated with at this point my suit's out of warranty and i will say that as nice as everyone at customer service is um they are in europe customer service is primarily active while i an east coast american am asleep at no point did i feel like they like abandoned me or anything like that but at some point i got really sick of the back and forth with this and currently i don't really use the rococo suit very much there are things i want to use it for like i want to use it more towards animation remember we talked about different kinds of applications people who use it to create their own game animations i think that's perfect i think that's amazing like that's such a great application for the suit the other thing i love about rococo is they've had like a really honest approach with how they're promoting things like if they find out that their suit is like a bad fit for a specific workflow like they don't tend to like hide that you may have seen the video corridor digital did where they made avatar 2 and it turned out really janky and like they used your coco suits and it wasn't like the world's best outcome if you're using multiple rococo suits like i would see if you can find some case studies and some people you could talk to about like how that went well i feel like i just said a lot of cons there are some great pros for a coco i think their price is right i think their price is good i told somebody a couple years ago i think the rococo suit is the 5d mark ii of mocap suits and if you know what i'm talking about then you know that this is a really important discovery invention machine that's going to make a lot of things possible for a lot of people in the same way that that camera made a lot of things possible the canon 5d mark ii so the rococo suit will kind of work out of the box it can run on its own wi-fi network the only downside to that is that you need to run your computer on that wi-fi network so if you're trying to troubleshoot your recoco you should have like another computer nearby that you can google stuff on it's great that it has built-in wi-fi that's incredible the only other big con with rococo is that they have subscription software costs it's not bad it's like pretty decent and they've recently changed their pricing models i think a little bit for the better but for me once i buy something like a rococo suit like i kind of just want it to work and i don't want to have to pay for any features that being said you can use it for free but what it won't do for free is streaming your live mocap data to unreal or unity that's it's that's a feature that you pay for per month or per year i want to talk about notable people who use this i'm going to talk about v tubers a couple other people too i really like charlie from prismatica as a dev i secretly have a man crush on this dude i think he's a genius and he's got a suit so i've seen some content from him he's someone who uses it to make animations for his game i don't know how much he's using it recently i've seen that dude does a lot of cool stuff some great v tuber examples is fofa mit she uses a rococo suit kana fuyuko is amazing she's so great pixel fire great example next i want to talk about the big guy i want to talk about accents we're just going to go out of order here so accents is obviously like the premium model i made a joke during a game once that it was probably the best mocap suit that you could buy you've seen youtubers use these suits um i do not know how people afford this other than like working directly with the company you've seen stuff from quarter digital code miko obviously is a great youtuber example and jonathan winbush is someone else who also makes really high top tier content who uh i believe use uh has just recently started getting into using accents equipment accents has a couple of different suits they have a couple of different pricing plans their software as a service model is astronomical and i heard a quote that was like 250 bucks a month to run their stuff and that's a lot of money i ultimately don't have one and i don't know that many people who do have them i thought about interviewing someone for this but i'm gonna point you to a video if you're really curious about the accent suit there's a really great rococo accents comparison done by viz guru so i'll have that link in description i've heard people talk about this stuff before ultimately you know you get what you pay for and the accent suit is by an order of magnitude more expensive than rococo and i think a lot of people should think about that especially v tubers you should really think about that and if we're talking about suits we can't forget gloves i don't have as much experience with this and i mostly want to talk from experience i do own a pair of rococo gloves and they're great the gloves work pretty well i have one sensor in my gloves kit that is like a little bit out of socket and just kind of got stitched in wrong and customer service kind of left me hanging on that one like i was within range warranty for the product and they were kind of like oh well can you just tie it on with some string or something i can't remember what they actually said it wasn't string but you get me so notable people who use rococo gloves are the people i've mentioned before who use for coco suits but also riku vr riku like me mixes and matches a lot of their mocap equipment manus also a big one you see manus more from people who have accent suits because to my knowledge manus is the company that handles all of rococo's gloves so they integrate specifically together so like you have manus gloves and you have an accents suit they work together i'm not sure if at one point accents bought manus or what happened exactly but they're also great i've had heard people mention that manus is sort of like powered by uh like a strip sensor that can like be recoiled based on like the curls of the fingers and rococo's are more based on accelerometers hands are tricky right so like whatever you're gonna do if it's gonna be animation like you're gonna have to clean it up you're gonna have to find a way to clean it up somehow and if you're doing v tubing it does might not matter that much my least favorite thing with accents and mana is how opaque their pricing models are i think there are other gloves out there too there's at least one brand i know i'm forgetting ultimately i've done plenty of streams where i have like these nasty like stuck doll hands that just move at least for youtubers like get a hand tracking solution of some sort which actually brings us to the leap motion so i'm talking about the leaps sort of in contrast to the gloves this is what i'm using for my character right now and they are all right so what's great about the leap is when you're in happy range with leap it's super accurate so like what i'm doing right now leap loves that look at these thumbs these thumbs are great i'm actually touching my fingers the there's inaccuracy here and it's like it's my fault for modeling my fingers badly but like you can see me like moving my thumbs all around my hands now what happens when i want to give a thumbs up it looks bad right because the camera is like right down here below me and i like it can't see the thumbs up while all the models are reasonably priced the model that i have currently is the old school ultra leap leap motion controller back when they were leap motion because i think they renamed to ultra leap it has 120 field of view if i recall versus like you know there's newer ones they've made that are better they have like a 240 or something like that this is a safe bet and it's really cheap so check out their other models i assume they all work with the sdk i just don't know anyone who has those i know a lot of people however who have this one who have the leap motion controller so there are so many v tubers who have this thing i feel like it's silly to make a list but i'll name a couple um so like cabal pumpkin potion horatius these hornsby these are all v tubers who are regularly doing 3d stuff with their hands the only thing that bothers me about my mocap system right now is that like my hands are more realistic than like the rest of my body you can see my body sort of like rotating left and right up and down bobbing bobbing bobbing and then here's these beautifully articulate hands um this is what i'm using right now i'm currently refactoring my motion capture system which is an optical one let's talk about optical there's a large gap between vr and high-end systems so like a vicon rig is gonna set you back tens of thousands of dollars however what won't do that is a steam vr kit of some kind the other reason that i don't wear a rococo suit or an accent suit or a perception suit is because of temperature so i'm a v tuber right like i do do animation and game stuff but for this i don't want to have a high barrier to stream like i said i want things to be easy i want to just roll up to my stream and jump in i don't want to suit up and deal with all that stuff and also not sweat through my clothes while i do this so let me talk about steamvr because that's pretty much the only game in town when it comes to optical motion tracking outside of this i have a valve index and i have about seven vive 3.0 trackers i own multiple base stations i have them in multiple rooms in my house uh you could theoretically use any vr setup to be able to do this anything that works with unreal you can technically get data out of watch the video i made about how to use the quest 2 for v-tubing should you use the quest 2 for v-tubing no i don't think you should do that you should definitely not buy a quest for v-tubing and while the quest does have the ability to interpret hands by looking through optical cameras it's an experimental feature and i'm not sure how to access that api these steam vr systems are optical they're using base stations on different sides of the room that can tell up to the millimeter where things are actually i think it's a little less than a millimeter and that's kind of part of what's awesome about it let's talk about the results these are honestly great the raw motion capture out of this is weird but it's accurate like it can actually be shaky like if you wear the wrong accessory to attach the vr mocap to your body it's gonna like actually shake the controller you can use it with any body size like it doesn't it doesn't matter and that's something i've talked about before when we were going through our rigging series of talking about how we want the bones to match the human that's going to drive them it's a big deal that's great the other thing is that these are easy to get the vive is a consumer product your valve index despite being a indie virtual production powerhouse is designed for home use you can use it as a vr console this is something faucemit talks about in her should you get full body mocap video you can also use the vive system for virtual production which is awesome like we've all seen videos of someone who's stuck a little vibe tracker on their camera this video is about full body capture though we're focusing on capturing the body if you're going to get any kit get an up-to-date one get a valve index the index controllers that you can use for fingers however the biggest problem when it comes to these is they don't have built-in software now if you're like me and you spend an inordinate amount of time in unreal engine and steam vr is up all the time and everyone on discord thinks you're just always playing vr all the time but like what software should you use one great example is kyle natalie of mega steakman's vr mocap system it's got a discord this dude stays on top of it all the time he's always publishing changes the other cons is that the battery life is kind of a concern the batteries are gonna happen on a per node basis i actually bought a shoe rack and then specifically built it out in such a way that i could put all my vives in there and i custom 3d printed a whole bunch of cable holders so the cables wouldn't fall out of the back i use an anchor charger which has iq intelligent charging and it can actually really charge all of the tractors really really fast which is great like i can usually get them back to full power within like an hour or two which is amazing don't quote me on it your results may vary the only thing with the five trackers is they can be uncomfortable depending on where you put them in on your body in my first version of my mocap software that i wrote i had it set up specifically to track me from behind so when i sat down then i couldn't really like lean up against my back because there'd be a vibe tracker sticking right into my stamp make sure that if you're getting trackers you get the vive 3.0 trackers a big thing to know here is that there are there is an older generation of steamvr hmds and an older generation of vive trackers now some people were using these a lot in early indie virtual production do not get them now they are not great they work only on two different base stations which means you can't triangulate to more stations and you can't have more visible at the same time which is a problem if i recall the battery life is worse on these don't get that system currently my recommendation for people who want to do full body mocap who are v tubers because i recommend them get a valve index same as fovement it's the best way to go here if you can get it hooked up and you can have a pipeline or a tool chain that will let you get that into a game engine it's going to look amazing um the vive 3.0s are great but there are a few areas in which they can be improved battery life can be a trick with these things i think the max i've caught on them is like five and a half hours six hours before they go ultimately you can buy battery extenders that you can wear rebuff reality makes a strap set that has a built-in extra battery pack however it does seem like someone has improved on the vive tracker design the tundra trackers from tundralabs everybody's crazy about these right now now i haven't owned one and i can't personally attest to any because chip shortages got bad problems with chip shortages they work in steam vr same as everything else they are as far as i know smaller longer lasting and easier to deal with than the vive 3.0 trackers and everyone i know who's gotten one loves them it's also worth noting that if you're going to use 5 trackers you're going to need usb ports think of them as usb devices i don't know if that's completely accurate but you're gonna need a com port on your computer taken up by a usb device tundra makes multi-usb dongles that you can buy these are also now sold out there are a few other things i haven't talked about in this video that are worth mentioning slime vr is um i want to say similar to tundra but from everything i've seen there's no reason to expect that they would be better than just five trackers they are a low cost option that i believe was being crowdfunded let's talk about the face the face is pretty much an iphone world right now everyone is mostly using iphones people are using iphones or they are in a studio using professional gear and markers and special cameras and things you and i can't afford the iphone comes with apple's ar kit which is a surprisingly amazing facial tracker if they had done any less effort to this it probably would have been a cute gimmick but it wouldn't have been amazing i'm using ar kit right now the only issue with these are the helmets i have the radical variants face cam iphone hmc this thing is awesome before this people were using goofy or things that were harder to maintain and stuff like that i think this thing is awesome it's super lightweight and super solid i have touched relatively few pieces of manufactured equipment that can manage to make that balance i've heard of others that people like like face good stuff like that these are all worth checking out i personally just own this one and most of the time when i'm v tubing just have my ipod sitting in a tripod mount on top of a gorillapod and i don't need that thing attached to my face right now because we're just doing a little thing at my desk uh there's also the possibility of more coming from iphone however we're on the other side of wwdc at this point and it's not looking like anything huge is about to drop just yet it is looking more and more like the future of at least sitting at the desk v tubers could be done entirely with an iphone and i for one welcome our cellular overlords there's a bunch of other mocap stuff and it seems like a new startup is happening every day for those who are brave enough to venture past the problems with the electronics market at the moment this is just what's happening right now there could be something next week that completely changes my entire opinion of things we're going to have more content on this channel about how to do mocap directly in unreal using control rig and any api that we can stick into it ultimately i wrote the motion solver controller for these leap motion hands and i did it just because i know how to use unreal if you're interested in learning how to develop experiences for streaming and for filmmaking and for other sort of unorthodox uses of game engines you should check out this channel you can also check out our discord server where i am collecting weirdos we're making cool stuff that nobody's ever seen before and i set out to do that and i can safely say i have done exactly that there are some really cool people uh hanging out there and if you want to talk we are always talking mocap we are talking about cap all the time also you know the deal this is youtube so if you want to see more videos like this feel free to subscribe but also if you can like comment throw notifications on all that stuff helps me reach more other people who are trying to use creativity to do new things we haven't seen before because i think we can all admit that there's enough boring repeatable junk out there and what's cool about all this technology and how accessible it all is is that it helps us make cool things that are surprising and new and wonderful so i hope you enjoyed this video have a great day

Channel: WoodyDevs

Views: 29,095

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Id: Ofpq7439uco

Length: 24min 41sec (1481 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 15 2022