Recording issue with ProBody V2 to Motionbuilder

[Heiko Thies]

Hi everyone!

I´m currently evaluating ProBody V2 2.25 incl. it´s support for live streaming to Mobu 2015. Everything works fine up to the point when I actually want to record the motions in motionbuilder. The live preview of the motions works just fine and I see my merged 3d character doing all the motions from the capture in real time. When I set the brekel plugin to record, activate record in Mobu and hit play I still see everything working fine. After I stop the recording set the plugin to offline and play back my recording, there is nothing there. The character looks all crumbled and distorted like it did when I left the visable area of the kinect. Setting the plugin back online and entering the frame the character behaves perfectly fine again and follows my motion. So pretty much everything works just fine, it´s just that Mobu does not seem to correctly record the motions.

Does anyone here have similar experiences and may be able to point me in the right directions? I already talked about this with Brekel himself via email. Unfortunately, he was only able to reproduce this behavior once, seemingly by accident without being able to reproduce it ever since. I´ve tested this with Motionbuilder 2015 and also with trial versions of Mobu 2013 and 2016, always the same result. I also tested ProdBody V2 versions 2.24, 2.23 and 2.12, every time the same result, everything works fine, just not recording the motions.

I really hope I can find a fix for this issue, as this would be a real deal breaker for me not being able to have real time capture in Motionbuilder. Recording in Probody V2 works just fine and is amazing all on it´s own. But for the workflow I am aiming for it introduces a lot more unwanted steps.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

Heiko

[Brekel]

Indeed I'm having troubles reproducing, and am baffled as to what/why it's happening on your machine/workflow.

Just thought of something, after recording can you have a look at the fcurves of one of the joints and check if maybe the data is on the timeline but not starting at frame 0.

Due to how the internal time stamping works it could be possible that they somehow end up on frame 20000 or something high like that, auto framing the view should show that if that is the case.

[Heiko Thies]

I just did another recording and checked what you suggested. As it seems there is nothing recorded at all. I clicked on a few joints from my test model and opened the fcurves view. There´s nothing there, no keyframes and clicking on "frame all" does not do anything. Also clicking on next or prev keyframe does not do anything. There´s just no data there at all as it seems. Pls. see attached screenshot.

[Heiko Thies]

Ok I think I finally found out why I had these problems. I feel kind of dumb or maybe it wasn´t mention in the documentation, I don´t know. The key is to be already in the visible area of the Kinect when you start recording, if that is the case motionbuilder does record my motions as intended. If I do everything the exact same way but the Kinect does not see me when I hit record/play nothing is being recorded. All my recents tests I´ve done on my own, so I had no actor ready to play in front of the kinect, that´s why I never noticed this before. Today I had my Kinect placed differently so it could see me already when I´m at the PC to hit record and now it works! =D

Jasper, would be great to get a confirmation from you if this a known thing that I just missed before or something everyone should be aware of. Thank you!

[Brekel]

Thanks for taking the time to get to the root of the problem and share it here Heiko!

Indeed I can confirm that, it records fine when some joints are visible at the start of the recording, but when no joints are visible when the recording is started it will not record anything even when they do become visible later in the take.

I wasn't aware of this actually, otherwise of course it would belong in the manual.

I'll have to see if I can do a fix for this, or that it's something that is inherent to how MoBu's internals work.

Thanks again for figuring this out!

[Heiko Thies]

Glad I could be of help! I´m just so happy to have finally found out what was the problem, stuff like that boggles the mind! :)

I will do some more evaluation testing in the coming days, but now where this issue is resolved, I´m pretty sure I´ll soon place my order for ProBody V2 with you. :)

I´m really looking forward to maybe being able to capture using two kinect V2 for full body rotations etc some time in the future of ProBody. This is such an amazing technology we could just dream about only a few years back.

[Brekel]

Thanks for your kind works, indeed it's amazing technology and we're living in exciting times!

[April Warren]

Just came across this same issue. Just as an FYI and workaround, if you use MotionBuilder's Story Record function it will record the data if you do not start in the volume.