It’s not very often that professional motion capture studios get clients who demand multiple errors in every shoot. But that’s exactly what happened when Kapnetix visited eNStudios last week.
First, a huge thank you to Michael [last name] and the rest of the team at eNStudios. It was one of the most well organized and professionally run production houses that we have ever been to. Definitely check them out.
One of our primary focuses at Kapnetix is to collect as much animation data as possible to continue to improve our motion capture cleanup model, and to make it work on as many different animation styles as possible.
So we spent 20+ hours recording animations in eNStudios impressive Optitrack Prime X 41 studio… but there was a twist. We purposefully generated errors in each movement sequence to replicate the most common types of errors that mocap post-production teams have to deal with every single day.
And even though we caused these errors on purpose, the eNStudio team still spent hours and hours correcting the animations in post. The result will be pairs of raw, error-filled animations along with their professionally edited versions. These are invaluable to training our model to fix the errors itself, without the need for animators spending hours fixing the problems frame by frame.
One common category of errors that we wanted to emulate is blocked or missing markers. This can happen naturally in many different ways, but we decided to force these errors on purpose by covering random markers with black tape. For now, eNStudios will fix this manually. But this data will be used to train Kapnetix to do it automatically in just seconds.
The next category of errors that we simulated was repositioning the mocap actors to the far edges of the capture space. This way they are out of range from the cameras on the far wall. Again, this is another common error that production teams work very hard to avoid. And fixing so many undetected markers is currently a complete nightmare without Kapnetix. But soon, it won’t be any problem at all. 🙂
We plan to do more sessions with eNStudios in the future to keep building up our training data so that we can release a general cleanup model to be used by anyone. Currently, we’re mostly focused on building custom models for larger studios that have plenty of animation data for us to train your very own private model on.Reach out to us today if you want to learn more!
