Noitom Visit at Fonco Studios
If you ever have the opportunity to get a demonstration of the NoitomVPS system, you should take it. I popped over to Fonco Studios to take a look at Noitom’s latest offerings.
Designed to be a total performance capture solution for the small studio who wants to overcome the typical drifting problems commonly found in inertial suit tracking data, the Noitom VPS system gets the job done.
This solution combines Noitom’s next generation sensors, five finger tracking gloves, optical trackers and up to 8 Qualisys M3 Cameras to stream data directly into Unreal Engine.
I used the quick strap solution to place sensors over my clothes and the process took about 20 minutes to get up and running with a short calibration. Additional time will likely be necessary to get get proper physical dimensions of the actor for better accuracy.
As an exceptionally tall individual, getting into a mocap suite can be problematic. However this strapped solution worked well enough despite the sensors occasionally slipping thanks to my loose fitting clothes. Wearing a dedicated mocap suit would fix this problem.
Ultimately the suit worked well. Data accuracy was reasonably good and more than accurate for most use cases. I feel it’s a prime choice for those doing previsualization and wanting to take that data into final production with only a modest need to clean up the mocap data. The drifting issues seen with most inertial suits is resolved thanks to the optical tracking found in the volume. As a hybrid solution it works well.
Pricing for a full solution like this might scare off the indie filmmaker. A full suit with 8 optical tracking cameras will set you back around $50k. But multiple actors and props are supported with additional hardware.
