Motion capture for film using a Kinect & Maya - try it yourself!

The film All Nighter was a recent finalist in the Lights, Canberra, Action film-festival. A Kinect, along with Maya (a piece of modelling software), was used in order to incorporate an animated character into the film. All up, the film was created in just 10 days.

fig. a

fig. b

fig. c

Setting Up

To start make sure you have...

A USB Kinect
the one sold separately to the Xbox360

A Windows Computer
required for the capture process - editing can be done on either Windows or OSX

Maya 2010 or above
if you're a student, you can get a free 13 month Maya licence through the Autodesk Education Community
Get your Kinect setup and working with your PC by the following this guide
Grab the two zip files provided at the bottom of this page. You'll find a MayaScript directory in both. Copy the contents to your Maya scripts folder:

Windows: C:/.../My Documents/maya/scripts

OSX: /Users/USERNAME/Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya/2010/scripts

In one of the zips, you'll also find a bin folder containing MayaOpenNIServer.exe. Extract this to anywhere on your computer.

Please Note: my scripts work in conjunction with Mirage's scripts (a copy of which is provided below). If you wish to grab the latest version of his scripts please visit his homepage

Capturing

Run the MayaOpenNIServer.exe that you extracted before. Once the Kinect footage is visible on screen (this can take a little while), you need stand in front of the Kinect and hold a surrender pose (fig. a)

Once you're satisfied it's working, click the 'Start Server' button
Open Maya and open the script editor (fig. b)
Under the MEL tab, enter the following code:

source mayaKinectMocap.mel;
mayaKinectCaptureTest();
showMocapWindow();

Execute this code using one of the blue arrow buttons located at the top of the script editor window
Using the windows that pop (fig. c) up you can then...

create nulls: creates some locators that will move once you connect to the OpenNI Server

connect: connects to the OpenNI Server. If you're still being tracked by the server, you should see the locators move

start: starts recording the locator (i.e. the actor) movement

stop: stops recording the locator movement

auto rig: creates and attaches some geometry to the Kinect locators. You can do this either before or after recording the movement, however if done before, it could cause your computer to slow down during the recording process

Compositing (in brief)

Film a background for your character
You will need to track the camera movement in 3D by following a tutorial like this one
Once you render your character from the perspective of your animated camera (with a transparent background), you will need to composite the character and background together using a program like Nuke or After Effects

Downloads

My Maya Mo-Cap Scripts v0.3 (.zip)

my scripts are provided under a creative commons licence

Mirage's Maya OpenNI Server v0.2a (.zip)

please see Mirage's homepage for licensing details.