teensy 3 motion capture animation 3ds max

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ben10teensy

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3D animation motion capture using the Teensy 3.0 board. The following Project was possible using the teensy board and some sensors to capture the motions.

All of you have seen big blockbuster movies with very expensive motion capture devices. Like avatar or star wars, most of which used optical systems consisting of lots of very high definition infrared cameras and suits full of dots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ1JzYPjcj0&feature=youtube_gdata_player


I personally have zero experience with microcontrollers. So when
I set out to find a solution I really didnt even know where to start. I knew I needed to digitize rotations coming from an arm or a leg. One of the first devices I investigated was a computer mouse. looking into rotary encoders then I came across using Potentiometers.

And then looking into microcontrollers I saw the arduino and then I came across the teensy which had a lot more analog inputs.
Being that I needed one analog potentiometer and possibly two per joint.
I knew I would need at least 14 analog inputs and with the $20 price took the experiment on.



After my first attempts to get it going the basic serial examples helped to get the serial monitor receiving the data. But on the 3d software side i was not getting anywhere.
A couple of people online were able to make a box spin, or through other software they moved a teapot. This was bad, I was not going to do any motion capture with that.
So for some time I just left it.. Then early this year I guess my brain kicked back on and through midi programming I got multiple sensors to talk to the 3D software.

Basically each sensor gives value of 0-127
With midi you caan have multiple channels up to 16. So to make it easy I made each potentiometer go to its own channel and use a control number of 10 or 11 which correspond in midi to volume or pan controls.

The software I used was 3dsmax being that at work that's what I used but I also was able to get it working through motionbuilder. Motionbuilder is even more powerfu and exciting because you can directly connect multiple teensy devices, joysticks.
3ds max can handle one midi device
So I was able to assign a potentiometer to the rotation of the characters arm.
After successfully using two Sensors in 3ds max I built a basic wireframe of the upper body with 8 sensors. And I am able to move the character in realtime. Not only that, I can record the movements in realtime and all within the same 3d software. No need to go to 3rd or 4th party software and have to deal with all the transfering of data and converting formats. This was one of the most exciting parts for me and anyone who makes this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llyMYImXD74&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Here I built the skeletal wireframe for the upper body

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90VFtk6psoA&feature=youtube_gdata_player

I will continue to post updates to the project as I make improvements.

Benjamin Angulo
 
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