Simple & Inexpensive Motion Capture Solutions?

I’ve been doing some research into motion capture solutions on and off, and I’m wondering if anyone knows about one that makes use of a Mac’s internal webcam, or a camcorder connected to a computer. Is there such a thing out there, or would I have to buy a Kinect or PlayStation Eye for my PC to do inexpensive motion capture?

The camera’s the expensive part, since I’ve found a couple of pieces of free or inexpensive motion capture software already. The reason I’m asking about solutions that use an internal webcam or a consumer camcorder is that I already have one of each (and I’d like to be able to use those, if at all possible) and I’d prefer not to have to shell out more than $150 USD for a mocap or mocap-capable camera for what are in all likelihood only going to be hobby projects.

Anyone? No ideas?

The Kinect is probably your best bet, but you would ideally need two or three of them to surround the person to get the best capture. Maybe you can find some used ones on Craigslist.

If you had gotten in during the Kickstarter campaign, you could have gotten one of these mocap suits for five hundred dollars…
https://www.neuronmocap.com/products-fullwidth

Steve S

I don’t know of anything but I would be interested in a solution if you find one. Do you already have software? I wonder if you can just set up two cameras orthogonally, wear markers for motion tracking, and then use the data from both tracks to cover all 3 axes.

Kinect probably is your best bet, there is a lot of middleware software to get a good connection from the actual Kinect, to the program you wish to make use of the datafeed with (in your case Blender I’m assuming). You can check out FAAST and NI Mate to see what can be done like that, FAAST is good for the GE, while NI Mate can be used for all types of things including MoCap with a tiny bit of work.

If you value money over time you could also try to use software like After Effects (if you already have it, otherwise forget the thing with money over time haha) to track areas of high contrast on your body with your webcam and another camera (phone etc) from 2 perspectives and then with a little scripting calculate the XYZ Coordinates from the motion tracking data. But that would likely be a bit messy.