Around the Corner

Kinect for Xbox One

Another great week for tech. I’m in hog heaven reading all the information being shared regarding the newly-revealed Xbox One. I’m obviously most interested in the upgrade to the Kinect technology. Here’s what I’ve gleaned, thus far: Full HD with 1080p resolution Use of something called “Active IR”, a type of time-of-flight depth detection rather than relying on structured light, allowing accurate depth data even in the dark Enhanced skeleton tracking, with muscular stress and joint orientation down to the... Read more →

Using the Microsoft Kinect SDK to bring a basic point cloud into Maya

Today’s post presents a very basic implementation of a point cloud – essentially equivalent to the code in this previous post – which makes use of the Microsoft Kinect SDK to bring the Kinect color image on a Maya image plan live. While for an image it was pretty straight forward to take the Kinect color image and use the Maya API MImage class to read that image. This time we are interested to get the depth information out of... Read more →

Initial fooling around with Kinect and Maya

In a previous post, we talked about the Maya device API and mentioned I may try and write a device plug-in for the Kinect. There is few things I want to try with the Kinect: Some simple model capture using the Kinect’s RGB-D camera Generate a point cloud Simple gesture-based control And finally using the latest Kinect Fusion SDK create object meshes The first seemed a fun approach to test out the Kinect interface, although ultimately the currently-available precision (the... Read more →

Maya Device API

Recently there was a lot of enthusiams around Virtual Production and use of Motion Capture. This article really summarize what great future and fun we will get on that side. But this is mainly about Virtual Production in general and mostly applied to MotionBuilder when it comes to Motion Capture. But there are many people asking - ok, but what about Maya and/or 3ds Max. I am not an expert on 3ds Max, but what I am going to say... Read more →