By Jim Rossignol on November 27th, 2012 at 2:00 pm.
Haha. Yeah, Garry knows what to do. I’ve posted videos of his Kinect experiments below, and you can see exactly why the infamously aberrant Half-Life 2 mod actually needs Kinect support by watching those. Readers with memories will recall that we talked to Garry about his plans for the mod earlier in the year.
The Kinect support will apparently arrive “this week or next”.
Via the watchful eyes of PCGN.
27/11/2012 at 14:09 boniek says:
I wonder if kinect can be used in motion capture animation for example for indie games.
27/11/2012 at 14:12 Clavus says:
Isn’t it already? I’ve seen it being used for animations in Source Film Maker already. As far as I know the Kinect SDK allows you to translate the capture data to a variety of formats.
27/11/2012 at 14:56 AbyssUK says:
Didn’t Jim of Big Robot not at all RPS fame say he needed to do the animations for Sir you are being Hunted ?
Here we go Jim a quick and easy way to make the animations… indeed for the hounds I volunteer my giant schanuzer [looks like a robot dog]
edit:should have read who wrote this article… going to leave my stupid comment anyway
27/11/2012 at 15:48 Clavus says:
Don’t think the Kinect works for animals though. It tries to apply a human skeleton to everything it sees moving.
27/11/2012 at 16:10 TechnicalBen says:
It does whatever you program it to do. Mind you, the base programming puts a human skeleton on.
27/11/2012 at 16:11 LionsPhil says:
Some of it’s baked into firmware/data-on-the-wire constraints, isn’t it? Like seeing in terms of depth perception. (I don’t know why you wouldn’t want your Kinect to do this, mind.)
28/11/2012 at 03:17 yrrnn says:
Using a Kinect for motion capture would give you a pretty crappy result, which would need to be extensively cleaned up and corrected by an animator. An animator who would be just as capable of hand keying the movements themselves, and would probably prefer to be doing that anyway. I’ve never met an animator who said they prefer cleaning up mocap to actual animation, and I know a lot of animators.
And no, you can’t just get any old pleb to clean up mocap rather than an animator. Quite a lot of work goes into it, even on a good, non-kinect setup.
27/11/2012 at 16:10 LionsPhil says:
Yep. Practical Problems is an (utterly excellent) one; see the description for the making-of.
He had to do some extra work to it, but it’s easily professional-grade as a result (in that I’ve paid for plenty of games with worse animation with this).
27/11/2012 at 16:21 Ny24 says:
Yes, it can!
27/11/2012 at 16:22 simoroth says:
Motion capture is pretty terrible for small studios and is a big waste of time.
The problem is, it creates far too much data, that has to be cleaned up by hand. That’s fine if you can hire someone for minimum wage to scrub through it deleting keyframes, but in small studios that’s not cost effective. Far better to just do it all by hand.
Plus motion capture just isn’t the same as “Animation”. It always looks floaty and a lot of the expression is lost. You can’t easily add flare to mocap data, animation really needs a personal touch.
27/11/2012 at 18:43 Synesthesia says:
This man is right! Give him an internet.
28/11/2012 at 01:44 skittles says:
Maybe, I would imagine you could program in some constraints to dump a lot of excess data though. Most of it is from small jitters, and I can’t imagine it is that difficult program an automatic smoothing of them. Certainly Kinect is no good for complex movements, but I imagine it could be used to quickly get reference for the hundreds of simple movements you often need in any game project. Complex ones could then be done by hand. And I almost always think mocap is the better way, yes it does often look floaty if no cleanup is done, however it does create a much better visual experience usually when well done. Just look at Banner Saga animations, and they used a fairly simple mocap system.
Yes hand-done animations CAN look extraordinary, however I can count the number of times I have seen that on my fingers. Simply not enough time and not enough really good animators, in general the standard of hand animation is pretty poor. You say animation needs a ‘personal touch’ but seriously I have very seldomly seen that personal touch used effectively. In short-film certainly, but not in game projects.
28/11/2012 at 02:18 Jackablade says:
If you could get this message to Robert Zemeckis I’d be most appreciative.
27/11/2012 at 23:02 ripclaw says:
Yes, you can do mocap reasonably well with two kinects (one by itself is not ideal). However, to actually use it in game requires so much clean up effort, that the time spent on that would be as well spent doing the animation from scratch with some good reference videos. Kinect mocaps can however be used as a reference for the animator to get an idea about how certain movements work.
That said, in many cases manual animation has a lot more character than mocap. The mocap you see in films for example usually went through several iterations of hand animation after the capture, leaving not much of the original mocap data.
27/11/2012 at 14:11 uh20 says:
lip sync’ing mic spam, and now this!, garry, you are making quite an impressive list of things to slack off with before, you know, actually making/filming something
garry was also talking about linux support, so i hope something comes up soon.
27/11/2012 at 14:23 LordCiego says:
Properly creepy.
27/11/2012 at 14:31 Hairball says:
That looks pretty cool, maybe we’ll see some mods/addons similar to Happy Action Theatre which actually make use of the controller fun rather than trying to build games hampered by its limitations.
27/11/2012 at 14:36 DerNebel says:
Finally!
A reason for the Kinect to be a product that can be bought!
Aside from the obvious fun of playing with friends but I rarely do this because I’m lonely and we play DOTA2 together anyways.
27/11/2012 at 14:44 haradaya says:
The cinderblock on a rope should be the new logo for Garry’s Mod.
27/11/2012 at 14:46 phelix says:
Something tells me a lot of people are going to use it to create GMod porn… in multiplayer!
27/11/2012 at 15:08 godofdefeat says:
I hope that you are wrong.
IF not…
God may have mercy upon us.
27/11/2012 at 15:51 Clavus says:
That’s hardly new ground for the GMod community: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea1L_SwDavg
27/11/2012 at 16:13 LionsPhil says:
Using that Renamon model.
27/11/2012 at 14:52 gibb3h says:
that is very cool, hope we see some other source based games taking advantage of it, I really like the idea of motion capture for indie devs as well
27/11/2012 at 14:54 Everyone says:
This’ll be a better WiiFit than WiiFit!
27/11/2012 at 14:55 The Random One says:
I’m on my cell so I can’t watch the video now, but looking at the preview stills fills my mind with alegrÃa y cosa buena eeeeeeeeeee MACARENA
27/11/2012 at 15:45 Turquoise Days says:
I was hoping for ‘Thriller’, and am disappointed. Give it a week though…
27/11/2012 at 16:19 f1x says:
or gan…….
nah, I won’t say it
27/11/2012 at 15:44 Valvarexart says:
Now get an Occulus rift, a powerful laptop in a rucksack, lots of kinects with some custom firmware and find a big field.
27/11/2012 at 17:12 rawrty says:
Haha sounds like fun. I can just imagine the reaction of someone who happens to wander by and sees you tromping about and flailing wildly in the middle of a field wearing all that gear.
29/11/2012 at 02:32 particlese says:
Haha, wow, now that would really be something! And if the wandering stranger unwittingly spawns an avatar at his location within the field of Kinects, I imagine he’d quickly find himself at the bottom of a pile of exuberant GModders.
No glomping, but still relevant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpwN23wPeKg