Sorry dear readers, I missed a week back there. Truth is that I am waiting on parts for my camera mount and the pitch project that I am working on here at the CDM needed an increase in work hours to make our milestone. Things are more balanced now and I have some updates.
On the RGBD front I have been slowly solving hardware problems. Firstly is that I've ordered a number of parts that will go into the 3D printed camera mount that I am working on (more on that later) and I expect them to arrive in the next few days. With any luck these parts will be the easiest part of the assembly and snap into my properly scaled 3D printed camera mount.
About that camera mount. I think that I may have solved the scale problem. Somewhere between sketchup, Maya and an exported .stl file the scale was lost. This led to imperfect sizes for the prototype of the 3D printed camera mount which mean that my Kinect device just wouldn't fit. To combat this I made a calibration cube. This cube was based on the grid size that appears in the ReplicatorG 3D printing program that Kimberly Voll is using to print this stuff. A little research online found that the grid was likely in centimeters, so then it was a just a matter of making a centimeter cube in Maya and watching the scale as the file was put through ReplicatorG. What I ended up with was a cube that was dang close to 1cm, thereby confirming that now I can measure and export my 3D models with predictable results.
Once the scaling was figured out I needed to modify the camera mount itself. I felt that there were a few details that made the placement of the Kinect extra difficult, so I changed them in Maya. Primarily I was concerned with the severity of a arm hook which holds the Kinect in place, as well as the angle in which the arms were arranged. I lessened that hook with some soft selection tools and modified the angle of the holding arms so that they were more straight and less pinchy. Of course I was paying close attention to measurements of the Kinect itself, the scale in Maya and the grid placement of the model. My new model has been sent to Kim and I expect to have a new version of the camera mount in a couple of days. Exciting!
"Well that's great," you may be saying. "But what are you going to do with it once it is all together?" Good question dear reader! I have used the past week to brainstorm what I could do with this alternative film recording setup and I have come up with a few ideas. What I would like to do is make a series of short experimental captures to see how I can capture interesting events and present them in new ways. Here is a list of some of the performances I had in mind:
- Interviews about the CDM that blend the 2D and 3D components.
- Flag dancing.
- Meteor performance (a type of juggling).
- Perspective play with figure cutouts made from foam core and glue.
- My dog
That's all well and good, but I have a plan B too. The above plan still needs a DSLR camera which has the capability of Live Video and that is something that I will have to either purchase myself or barrow from a friend. If this, or any of the other integral pieces fall through, I have my backup plan, 123D Catch. Autodesk's experimental 3D capture application is an easy way to quickly create 3D meshes based on photos. I have been working with this application in my downtime so that I can understand how it works and see if I can get any of those meshes into the game that I am developing for my pitch project.
These attempts have been met with limited success. It would seem that there are a few things that can really aid in getting 123D catch to generate a successful mesh and I'm still figuring them out. First off, the web app sucks and one should only use the downloaded application of 123D Catch. This is because the desktop application allows for custom stitching of each photo that was taken, allowing for much greater control of which points are really descriptive of the 3D shape of the object being processed. Secondly, there is a sweet spot of in terms of number of photos that the system likes as well. Less than 20 seems to be too little but more than 35 seems to confuse the system, not to mention trying to get elevated photos of the top of the object which really confuses the program. Thirdly, the size of the photos is also important. Since they are being transferred to Autodesk and being put through some automated magic, I assume that overly large photos (<3mb) simply don't get processed. This is evidenced from my early attempts and they're ever processing status.
So I thought that I had the number, resolution and placement of the source photos figured out. I had limited success with a toy Lama, seen below, and I was ready to try real people again. However, something is still not right with my capture process as my models are still in processing limbo. I did have less than 20 images in that submission, so perhaps that was the problem. Regardless, more experiments with capturing and stitching need to be done before I have a reliable workflow for generating these 3D meshes. At this point, the end of this exploration would see these meshes appear in my pitch project game for Easter Egg purposes.
Alright so that's what has happened these last two weeks. My 3D printed RGBD camera mount version 2 is almost done and I have more direction on the 123D front as well. If the camera mount needs another week worth of work then I am prepared to setup another temporary RGBD configuration and start testing out my ideas in a more limited manner.
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