iPi Soft Blog

July-September Contest - And the Winner Is...

Thanks to all contestants for their brilliant works!

This time we have two winners.

Dirk Erdmann & Robert Schnüll with their work "Numb3r" are awarded the main prize - 1 year subscription to iPi Studio Pro. This work contains no so much mocap content, but its overall quality is really impressive, and accompanying "Behind the Scenes" is very creative.

Dionisii Vergasov and his work "Last Survivor" is awarded the special prize - 1 year subscription to iPi Studio Basic. The work may look not so polished, but it contains a lot of mocap animations, some of them include very complex motions. iPi Soft's team is really excited that not only established animation studios, but also mocap enthusiasts in the beginning of their career are able to provide winning entries!

Congratulations!

The main prize:

 

Description from the author:

We are Robert and Dirk from Germany. As the team behind UniversVFX, we made a Sci-Fi short film about a society, in which the implementation of humanoid robot is tested. You could imagine that it is set about 10 years before Will Smith is fighting the robots in iRobot. 
To get the animations for the created robot that we wanted we decided very early to do it using motion capture. Since our budget was absolute nothing we looked around for affordable or free solutions. Using the trial version of iPi Studio and two borrowed Microsoft Kinect cameras, we had our own, diy motion capture studio. We loved the way we were able to do quick performances and implementing it in Cinema 4D, which we used to animate and render the robot. Using this software and to be able to use the new kinect camera or a bunch of them seems to be the ideal solution for starting, low-budget filmmakers and 3D- artist.

Behind The Scenes:

 

 

The special prize:

 

Description from the author:

More than 90% of the motion this time is captured with iPi Soft.
For motion capture I used iPi Basic with 6 Sony PS3 Eye cameras and 3 PS Move Controllers.

July-Sep. Contest Entries - Dirk Erdmann & Robert Schnüll

 

Description from the author:

We are Robert and Dirk from Germany. As the team behind UniversVFX, we made a Sci-Fi short film about a society, in which the implementation of humanoid robot is tested. You could imagine that it is set about 10 years before Will Smith is fighting the robots in iRobot.
To get the animations for the created robot that we wanted we decided very early to do it using motion capture. Since our budget was absolute nothing we looked around for affordable or free solutions. Using the trial version of iPi Studio and two borrowed Microsoft Kinect cameras, we had our own, diy motion capture studio. We loved the way we were able to do quick performances and implementing it in Cinema 4D, which we used to animate and render the robot. Using this software and to be able to use the new kinect camera or a bunch of them seems to be the ideal solution for starting, low-budget filmmakers and 3D- artist.

Behind The Scenes:

 

 

July-Sep. Contest Entries - Philipp Feigenbutz & Anna-Maria Scharf

 

Description from the author:

We are Studio Feix, a team of two focusing on motion design that is based in Berlin.

Despite being a small studio, we are always keen on trying out new techniques, which inspire and challenge our creative process.

By achieving almost realistic character animations we were aiming for a cinematic feel, that forms a beautiful contrast to the low poly modeling style.
After trying out a few different markerless motion capturing programs, we decided on using iPi Soft’s demo version (This was back May).
Being one of the few real time programs that works with multiple different cameras (and therefor producing more reliable 3D data), iPi-Soft proved to be our very favorite solution.
All character animation was tracked using two Kinect 360 cameras with iPi Soft. We placed the cameras in two opposite corners of a 20 square feed room, so barely enough space but it still came out fine. For head and hand tracking we additionally worked with up to three PS move controller at a time.
The iPi Soft interface was easy to handle and for any issue the online community helped out with some handy hints.
Personally I loved being able to detect my own walking style bringing some of my own character to the astronaut for this personal project.

The music video received a lot of positive feedback and was featured on various platforms, amongst them boom, thecratorsproject, io9 and wired.
http://www.booooooom.com/2015/06/18/animation-calvin-cardioid-everything-to-me/
http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/music-video-a-lonely-astronaut-dives-into-a-low-poly-future

We definitly consider using your program at any given chance for a commercial project. Coming from a design background, we would be exited for an Apple compatible version.