Got a Blend file and a Kinect capture program that run hand-in-hand. There’s only one problem I have found. It doesn’t capture a whole armature, only separate armatures with single bones. Ya, grant it the skeleton is complete. It moves the way I would want it to, however I can’t seem to link all of the separate armatures into one armature and still keep their animation paths intact . Here’s a picture.
There’s got to be away, I just can figure it out. The closest thing I got to work was ‘Copy Transforms’ constant on a different armature, however the bones were not linking properly. Here’s another pic:
Okay, better yet. Is there any free skeletal capturing program that doesn’t take 2 to 3 weeks to figure out? FYI: The one I used in the example above was called ‘WpfApplication2’
There’s no way to combine a bunch of single bone armatures into 1 and keep the animation data intact. Well there is, but it would take so much work, and I’m not 100% sure it would work, so you probably don’t want to try it.
The way I see it, you need like a shadow rig for this, at least I think that’s what they are called. It’s a simple armature that copies the bone movements of the rig you’ve shown. I think they are used in game animation, the idea is like this: the animator uses a full animation ready rig to animate. This rig is too complex for the game engine, so a second basic bone rig is made for the game engine and it copies the full animation rig’s movement, then it’s animation data is sent to the game engine.
You could duplicate all those single bone armatures, take all those single bone armatures, combine them into 1 armature. Find the ‘master’, or COG bone, this is the one that controls the position of the armature. In your case, I guess it might be the single bone armature with the name ‘armature’ with no .001 number after it. The corresponding bone in the new armature would copy loc/rot/scale of that COG bone. From here out, each bone on the new rig would have to be made children of the bone before it, and the bone after it would be it’s child bone. All these other bones would then just have to copy rotation of the corresponding bone in the kinect armature. That will give you a single armature rig composed of several bones that would work in blender and copy the motion of the kinect rig.
