Motion Capture Transforms Dancers into Compelling 3D Animations -- Dancing into the Future

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March 28, 2007

Motion Capture Transforms Dancers into Compelling 3D Animations

The current issue of BusinessWeek has a cover story about the latest developments in motion capture technology and how it's being used for commercial and entertainment purposes.

Business Week - Virtual Reality and Motion Capture Cover Story

The BusinessWeek article uses the term "motion capture" in a very broad sense to encompass any system that can track, capture and respond to the motion of people and objects.

The Nintendo Wii computer game system is a good example of a popular motion sensing device that monitors the movements of the game controller in space as it's manipulated by a player. Here's a good video that illustrates how the Wii system works - if you watch the entire clip, you'll see how it is used to play different types of games.

But from a dancing perspective, motion capture is especially intriguing when the 3D coordinates of a body in motion are converted into animated dance sequences.

Here are four videos that are based upon using motion capture technology to transform the movements of real belly dancers and a flamenco dancer into 3D animations.

Belly Dancers

Nice detail in this first example. I'm curious what belly dancers think about the quality of the captured movement:

There's no audio for this 3D computer rendering:

Here's another example of a belly dance animation - I can't embed it in my blog. The movement feels very fluid but I wish they got rid of the horizontal band of bright light in top third of image that makes it difficult to clearly see the dancer.

And an impressive flamenco dancer:

In upcoming posts, I'll include videos and pictures that show how the motion capture process works from a nuts-and-bolts perspective. If you know of good links to pictures and videos of different motion capture systems - especially ones that show examples of dancers, please let me know about them.

Posted by Doug Fox on March 28, 2007 8:17 AM

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3 Comments

Natalia said:

I can give you a belly dance perspective on the two clips you posted:

On the first one, the motion capture and movement on her body is quite good. Unfortunately, her costume moves extremely unnaturally (especially the hip belt) The fringe on her top tends to move as a monolithic unit (it ripples all the way across, etc) and that's just not how fringe moves.

The belt, I couldn't tell if it was supposed to be fringed or not. If it was supposed to be, it just moved wrong, and if it wasn't supposed to be, it was animated in such a way that the belt moved somewhat apart from her hips in a way I found distracting and unrealistic.

Even though it seems like I'm nitpicking, what I'm trying to say is that for dance performance, it's not enough to motion capture the body if the motion of any costume pieces is not going to work right. It undermines the "real-ness" of the animation.

As for the 2nd bellydance clip, the motion capture is lovely, but as the author of the clip says in the comments to the video, the technology she used could not capture torso articulation (and from the looks of it, not hip articulation either) which makes that particular motion capture technology basically useless for bellydance, or any other dance form that relies heavily on torso-based movement.

Again, in this case, the motion capture system does a great job of capturing everything it is capable of capturing, but falls short because of what it doesn't have the capability of capturing.

Added: March 28, 2007 4:32 PM | Permalink

Doug Fox said:

Natalia,

Much thanks for the belly dance perspective on the 3D animations.

Added: March 29, 2007 9:25 AM | Permalink

MoCap said:

We did the motion captures for both the examples at www.phasespace.com. The first was done with Imzadi wearing a spandex suit, so we just tried to capture the fringes and such from images of the video we took for reference.

The position of the cloth and physics simulations took several weeks of work, whereas the motion capture took a few hours. We actually motion captured about 4 or 5 dances, but were bogged down by the lighting, and rendering, or we'd have done the others. We have the motion capture data if anyone is curious.

The second was done at SIGGRAPH 06 where the dancer signed up and was captured with no preparation at all. If we had put markers in specific positions, we could have captured much more realistic motion, but these were free experiments with little or no clean up. Again, let us know if you want the data.

MoCap
www.phasespace.com

Added: December 9, 2007 7:48 PM | Permalink

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Since 2005, Doug Fox's blog has covered the intersection of dance and the Internet. A primary focus is to help dancers and dance companies use the Internet and their dance videos for marketing, educational, creative and revenue-generation purposes.

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Dancing into the Future

March 28, 2007