I tested both Brekel and IPIsoft to capture my movements with Kinect. Brekel has a really cool fucntion where you can get live mocap in MotionBuilder, and hook those movements up to your own mesh.
However, the easier way was to use IPIsoft, a motioncapture program that lets you first record a movie, either with playstation cameraes or 1-2 kinects, and then let it track you with a biped skeleton. The program also lets you save it as a BVH file, a file that can easily be imported into max CAT rigs, which is what I use.
Brekel
Save out the BVH file from IPIsoft and load it into your Catrig. I used a standard biped for testing purposes. Make sure to check that everything is mapped correctly. Also change the scale of the imported mocap to match your CATrig.
The result were, as expected, shaky. As you get more cameras, the motion capture will be better, and the shakyness can be cleaned up afterwards. Max has the reduce key function which can smooth out the keys on the curves, allthough a more ideal form is to clean them in MotionBuilder.
The mocap is in this uncleaned state is not very pretty, however, the mocap can be useful as a 3d reference, maybe for a really cool dance. For using it as a reference in CAT, select the layer with the mocapped animation and activate "Display Layer Transform Gizmo". By activating it, you can easily "trace" the mocap and also copy keyposes from the reference.
I will write a part 2 if I get to do some more testing. Maybe a progress on cleaning up, or if I get another Kinect, compare the quality. For now I must say that, allthough the mocap got very shaky, it is definetly a cheap method for getting some quick reference up and running.
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