Behind the Boobs... MoCap!

Hey everyone, for those of you who have been around long enough, you might remember a thing Patreon used to have called "Community Goals". One of our top tier goals was the pledge that I'd purchase a system to input motion capture into our vids to bring all the advantages that allows...

A little story, there's a tl;dr at the bottom.

If you were around that long ago, you'll also know that despite years of effort - much as I tried to get it to work, it failed.

I'm heavily invested in the Daz Studio ecosystem (for all the character and set models), which does not easily allow for motion capture files to be added. I tried many things, getting Daz models into Blender which would allow it, doing the same with the software Houdini and iClone. Trying my hand back at Maya, which may have worked but was a crazy learning curve (and a hell of a cost investment).

I made some progress over time, but always hit a wall. I could get models into Blender! But the materials looked off. I was able to get characters back out of Blender so it would look right! But the animation was baked in and could not be modified. I could get a coder to write some scripts to get things working in Daz! Another dead end. But I remained optimistic, and since we had met the pledge tier I invested in a decently priced mocap suit, sure I'd eventually be able to solve the problem. After weeks for delivery and two months being held in customs, we finally got it! But production goes on, so it was quietly put away, waiting for when I would finally crack the mocap problem.

After four years I hadn't lost hope, but knew the odds were getting thin. Programs like Daz are getting long in the tooth, and updates are few and far between. Either I needed to completely re-think my content creation pipeline, or make peace with my old style animation techniques.

Out of the blue I was finally introduced to a new upstart program for animating. It had new world smarts and best of all had a feature to send the animation data back to Daz Studio! I've used it a number of times recently, mostly for big action movements, and the results were okay. Not great for finicky things like mouth movement, so it was a tool but not a game changer, but it rekindled my hope of hunting down the elusive motion capture beast!

After dedicating time this month to really sit down with it and figure out how everything could talk to each other (shortest answer, give everyone even more money), I finally succeeded! The first results aren't exactly Golum, and I'm not exactly Andy Serkis but the fundamentals are there! What you see above is one of 25 clips I recorded for various uses within the Bountiful Harvest update, and if you want to see the first properly implemented one, you can see it here (warning, it is a spoiler for some content coming up in the new update and is still a work in progress).

tl;dr We finally have a working mocap suit to help make animated content!