Customer Reviews

Understanding Motion Capture (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics)

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Our department is working on Motion Capture research. This book helps us to direct a practical approach on not only academic perspective but also entertainment applicaiton.

The historical overview in the first half gave an excellent and entertaining background. It tells the stories of various well known motion capture projects so readers can immediately relate to the real world applications of motion capture and understand what sorts of applications will not work. The technical information was well organized and clearly written. This is a must have for anyone considering motion capture as a part of their project! ---Scott Whitney

At last a no-nonsense book for both users of the technology and those considering using it in their future productions.

The first half deals with the checkered history of motion capture and it's use and misuse to date. Unfortunately most of the stories fall into the negative vein and concentrate on the cases where the use of motion capture turned out to be a costly mistake, but this is all to the benefit of the reader lest he/she should be aligning themselves to make the same mistakes!

There is good practical advice on how to come out of a motion capture session with useable data and some extremely useful math to allow you to transfer it to your character. If you are using off the shelf software some of this may be superfluous, but if you have the opportunity to supplement it with your own proprietary code it could save you months of work. Either way it is genuinely useful in understanding how raw data can be used to drive a computer generated character.

It is hard to find fault with this book. If there is one it is just that the reader is left wanting more of the invaluable 'war-stories' from those who have used the process in the past, and possibly more recently on projects like 'Titanic' and 'The Mummy', if those studios are willing to divulge the detils. Mr Menache warns that facial motion capture is beyond the range of this text but hints that there may be another one to follow to make up for this. It is comforting to see that he himself ran a motion capture studio for many years, and you can be sure that the sum of his experience is inside the pages.

Just buy it BEFORE you start your production!

I have trained people over 10 years on this technology. This is a must read for people before they purchase a system. How can you possibly know what you want if you do not know the pros and cons. I have worked with Alberto on projects in the past and he is a fountain of information. The only shame is that there is not a sequel with updated information.

It's too bad that this book isn't available new anymore. It's easy to gauge its value by the price it's holding as a used book. I'm the moderator of the yahoo motioncapture group, and this book was the stepping stone for me to begin developing my own motion capture system. This book is so useful, that I've got two copies. That way I can lend one to a friend, and keep one handy to solve the hard problems that come up as I develop my system. There are a couple of newer books that cover the basics, but if you want to get into the technical details of how it's done, this is still the reference to use. If you are a provider or consumer of mocap, this book covers both points of view and details project and cost considerations too. There really is no other mocap book that covers everything this one does.