Today has been all about recon still. I was going to just go ahead and buy a Rokoko Smartsuit because it seemed versatile, but then I realised it was not world-space calculated, but rather an accelerometer type setup. The customer service seems second to none, but the results are…questionable. The face tracking plugin and the mo cap software provided buy Rokoko does seem like a workable solution though, especially now I’m going with vive. Yeah, I’m back to Vive. It’s a tried and tested method of world space performance capture, and I already have most of the bits so I’ll proceed with that. It seems the standard amount of nodes for a body capture is six, so I’ve bought three vive trackers to get up to that level. Face, HandL, HandR, Hip, FoodL, FooTR. I’ll see how the IK is for the elbows and legs, but more would be better, perhaps another two on each shoulder, and one on thed as a virtual camera. I’ll explore this with the talent sitting down and take them off the feet.

For software, I’ll try Rokoko, There seems to be a consensus that the Ikenema is a cheap and very robust price of software, but it has been bought by apple and subsequently the site is pretty much down, and any reference of it taken off unreal marketplace. Very Suss. VR MoCap for unity is cheap enough for me to be not disappointed if it’s not good. It’s funny, This tech was cutting edge five years ago and it hasn’t gotten much better, just harder to access. I wonder if that’s because it was overhyped, investment wasn’t there, so the middleware has caved and been bought up by the whales, leaving AAA solutions…and crud.

As I said in an earlier post, I think I have been too hard on myself to make the work resulting out of this artistically significant, like I actually have something important to say. I’m not ready to take a position I have to justify. Anyhow, I’m hoping for this project to teach me, and the audience at similar rate, just offset. I do an experiment, I release the experiment. I need to give myself permission to make these things look nice. I’ve been quite against it up until this point, but It started to become inevitable when I lost three days deciding on render engines and literally couldn’t proceed without the whole project breaking before locking something in.

SO this is where I’m at. I can confidently use Unreal and Blender as tools, I am confident that I can use them as tools to create interactive theatre. This has taken a maintained lightspeed upskill that I’m super proud of. I’m confident I have the storytelling, directing and theatre experience to curate, light, decorate and present a piece. Should I just start doing this? No. I need to get back to aesthetics I feel. Perhaps I’m procrastinating, but I want to know that I can do some interesting tricks with motion capture footage. It’s all the rage- procedural physics and the like. It stands, out, it generate confidence for everyone. There’s only so so much ugly ass content I can post on an ugly ass site before the project may as well be I thing I do on Sunday afternoons. In other words, expect things to start looking nicer. Ive began to learn Houdini, which is a highly procedural program that I can apply my newfound coding confidence on, in an environment that feels a bit like C4d.