Personal Research Artefact 2: 2nd Mocap Lab Session

A second motion capture lab session was arranged for the second artefact created for the research project to correct the problems of the previous session. After cleaning up the data for the first mocap session, it was plotted to a 3D actor within MotionBuilder. This however had unexpected results due to the not having the required amount of marker point to drive the character. After testing the marker set up it was apparent that head, feet and limb markers needed to be added to drive those areas, as the lack of these resulted in the character freezing up. In the second mocap lab session more marker points were added to correct this problem. This resulted in a much more effective result for MotionBuilder to recognize the movement. This capture brought to light another issue in the form of how effective the cameras were in detecting the reflective markers and keeping them locked on a point. The cameras struggled to monitor these markers because of reflective areas in the room and on the clothing. Also each marker needed to be in the view of at least three cameras at a time for an effective capture and this was difficult to achieve with a basic 7 camera set up. This capture then had floors in marker detection and resulted in large gaps where markers disappeared or got confused with a different marker on the body which pulled the wrong extremity to desired location. The clean up for the disappearing markers had undesirable effects and brought body parts away from the correct area and resulted in deformed motion. Also noticed from the final plotting of the motion data was that different movements resulted in either a successful or unsuccessful capture, slower dancing was more effective then faster boxing.