Didn’t you just post v.1.2? Yep! But Victoria’s been hard at work the last few days, and has some cool features ready to go that should simplify the compositing process. You can grab the new panel from her GitHub fork of K2P. (1.3 is not yet part of the main branch of the software, but will be shortly.) 1.3 is now part of the main app! Download the new version here.
New features in 1.3:
- Axis Lock Controls for Character Precomps. Once your character’s rigged and animated, and you’re ready to add it to a scene, you can add these tools to its precomp with a click of a button. They enable you to lock the X, Y and/or Z-axis movement of the character’s overall position, and even keyframe your own position changes on top.
- 3D Template: Automatic compensation for Z-axis movement. No more annoying stretchy scaling when your capture track has Z-axis motion! KinectToPin now keeps your character locked in a single depth plane, so you don’t have to do any manual scaling. Like so:
- But what if I want my character to move in Z-space? Worry not! You can have your Z-movement back — minus the old scaling issues — when you get to the compositing stage. Just select your puppet’s precomp and click on the “Create Axis Controls for Character Precomp” button mentioned above. If the “Lock Z Axis” checkbox is disabled, KinectToPin will add back in the Z-movement removed by the 3D template.
- New UI layout, thanks to Christopher R. Green’s excellent Boethos. It’s prettier and more intuitive, and still works in CS4+.
- There’s also a minor bugfix for 1.2, where head, hand and foot layers weren’t zeroing out when rigged.
The overstretched guy on the left becomes the normally-proportioned guy on the right — no matter how much further toward or away from the camera he gets.
As usual, let us know if anything’s buggy or busted. There may be a few conflicts with Collapse Transformations.
25 comments
Pascal says:
Mar 12, 2013
Wow great. Any chance for full blown tutorial ;-)?
Victoria says:
Mar 12, 2013
That’s the next step. π I’m actually teaching a workshop on using the Kinect for filmmaking in a couple weeks, so I’m going to be building a lot of training materials!
Pascal says:
Mar 13, 2013
Looking forward to it π Keep up the great work
Nicolas Marois says:
Mar 13, 2013
Hello, thank you for making this available, I’ve been waiting for such a solution. Unfortunately I can’t get Kinect to pin to work, when I open it I have no image, if I hit cam it just froze even if I wait. But when I open Kinect travel I have an image, kinect is working. Ive even try to install openni manually, when I enter the last command in terminal I cant tell if it work or not. I input this :
sudo ./install.sh
And I get this:
THE-MIGHTY-ONE:OpenNI nicolasmarois$
Any Idea what the problem might be?
Thank you
Victoria says:
Mar 13, 2013
What OS are you running?
Nicolas Marois says:
Mar 13, 2013
Lion 10.7.5
Victoria says:
Mar 13, 2013
Oh — and what kind of Kinect do you have?
Nicolas Marois says:
Mar 13, 2013
Xbox with proper xbox adapter
Victoria says:
Mar 13, 2013
Hmmmm. I’m not on a Mac so this is really a question for Nick… It sounds like something’s keeping SimpleOpenNI (the Java library K2P uses to capture) from loading properly. It could be a couple things causing it… Do you have Java installed? What about all the OpenNI middleware bits (Nite, SensorKinect etc.)? We’ve been using the OpenNI bundles from SimpleOpenNI — I haven’t tested OpenNI 2.0 yet. Can you get a skeleton track in any of the OpenNI demo apps?
Nick says:
Mar 13, 2013
Good thinking, testing Kinect_travel first. There are a couple different Processing libraries for the Kinect, each with different features. Kinect_travel uses the OpenKinect library, the only one I know of that supports motor control–but it’s OS X only and has no skeleton tracking, so I made a little motor control utility for the OS X version of KinectToPin. KinectToPin itself uses the SimpleOpenNI library, which is cross-platform and does skeleton tracking.
Download Processing (we’re developing on 1.5.1) and the SimpleOpenNI library, and run the DepthImage example. If that also crashes, we know the problem’s with your OpenNI installation.
https://code.google.com/p/simple-openni/downloads/detail?name=SimpleOpenNI-0.27.zip
Nicolas Marois says:
Mar 13, 2013
At last! Kinect is working with Kinecttopin, I followed this tutorial:
http://vimeo.com/39264040
Ironically, can’t load the depth example, getting: No library found for SimpleOpenNi
Libraries must be installed in a folder named libraries inside the sketchbook folder.
I didn’t knew that application before, it looks really neat. I guess I have more troubleshooting ahead of me.
Now I’ll follow the KTP tutorials and see how it goes.
Thank you very much friends, this is really cool!
Cheers!
Nic
Nicolas Marois says:
Mar 13, 2013
Damn, spoke too fast. Cam is working no more freezing I can see myself in black and white, but nothing when I move to either capture option.
Victoria says:
Mar 13, 2013
While you’re in cam mode, you need to do a calibration pose to get K2P to start tracking your skeleton. Step 3 here. Once it’s tracking you, you can switch over to recording. If it’s not calibrating successfully, restart the app.
Nicolas Marois says:
Mar 13, 2013
Thank you for your swift reply, I will double check that I have all of those installed, will get back to you.
Nicolas Marois says:
Mar 13, 2013
O yeah!!! Now it’s working. Sorry for missing this one, you guys are the best. Thank you so much!!!
Victoria says:
Mar 13, 2013
Oh awesome! So glad you got it working! I’d love to see what you do with it. π
Davor says:
Apr 7, 2013
Hi guys, i am trying to get it working on a win7 x64 with xbox kinect.
While brekel kinect works just fine, kinectopin doesn’t, i dont get any camera view.
Please help its urgent
Victoria says:
Apr 7, 2013
That’s odd. Make sure Microsoft hasn’t reset your drivers from OpenNI/PrimeSense to their own. If nothing else grab the full zip of the whole project from GitHub, (not its downloads page). The latest beta can convert Brekel’s bvh captures for use with After Effects.
Victoria says:
Apr 7, 2013
Also, just give it a minute! Sometimes the camera is slow to load.
Davor says:
Apr 7, 2013
I gave it an hour.
I’ll try to grab the full zip, you mean the kinecttopin or openNI/PRIMESense zip?
Victoria says:
Apr 7, 2013
The github zip of KinectToPin has a BVH import button.
Davor says:
Apr 7, 2013
I tried it all, still no camera view, and still brekel works.
How can I import BHV capture into after effects?
Davor says:
Apr 7, 2013
The bhv button works, but i would still like to work with the camera view
Thanks.
Nick says:
Apr 7, 2013
If the BVH import isn’t working, it’s probably a joint names issue–there aren’t standard joint names like the 15 we use for OpenNI, so the import code has to be aware of all the major ones. I’ll be adding support for more naming conventions soon.
For installing OpenNI, I like these guys: https://code.google.com/p/simple-openni/
…remember that even if you have 64-bit Windows, you usually want to install the 32-bit OpenNI drivers for better compatibility.
Davor says:
Apr 8, 2013
Its all working now, but it crashes when i try to import a longer session into after effects.