on motion capture/animations

Motion capture is a very expensive endeavor. You can spend thousands of dollars or more for just a day's worth of recording at some of the studios that specialize in this type of work. So I had to see if it was at all possible to do motion capture relatively cheaply to instruct the rig (think skeleton) of the character models to move the way that they're supposed to. Full disclosure, I'm not an animator, nor am I an expert on how to create an animation using motion capture. There are people out there who are very skilled who showcase their talent on YouTube and I've been taking advantage of all the wisdom that they share. I find myself watching and re-watching videos all the time in order to learn the process correctly. A lot of the time I'll tinker and tweak and try to match my steps with what the person is saying in the video and it doesn't work because they are using a different version of the software, or they're doing a specific movement that I'm not doing.

For the motion capture especially, it's been tough because I've had to figure out which depth sensors to use (ended up using 2 Kinect Xbox One sensors) and which program to use to interpret the depth sensor data (been using IpiSoft). I've had to email the IpiSoft folks a number of times to figure out how to use the program. It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time just to learn how to calibrate the sensors. I recorded a whole slew of motion capture videos before I realized that the cameras weren't calibrated and I had to do it all over again. The program is relatively inexpensive to license compared to some other software out there. It's a little finicky in terms of the camera's synching. Also it's not ideal for something where you have to do wrist and finger movements, but it will work with the movements that I'm trying to do. I know aikido has a lot of wrist grabs and joint locks and heavy use of hands sometimes. In randori, however, you don't have the time to futz with these types techniques on any particular opponent considering there are two or more people running to attack you. All of the aikido techniques I'll be including will be executable using minimal finger or wrist movements, and focus more on arm and leg movements/body positioning. My initial goal wasn't to create a game that had every single technique in the aikido repertoire. There's a lot of improvisation in randori that leads to infinite interpretations of the techniques. So for me to try to get every technique in the game would be impossible anyway. Rather, I was looking for simple, quick techniques that would let the player move on to the next attacker efficiently.-+