Acclaim Motion Capture difficulty

[pinckneyb]

I'm sorry if this has been discussed elsewhere in the Forums, but my searches didn't produce any results.

I see that Acclaim Motion Capture (.ACM) can be imported into Alice. I have downloaded a couple of ACM files from the CMU ACM archives (which are amazing).

When I import the file, and tell Alice (in the dialogue that appears) that I want to apply it to a figure (a HeBuilder figure with no other attributes), I go through a series of dialogues that let me assign ACM values (hip, femur, tibia, humerus, etc) to the parts of the model.

When I've reached the end of this sequence, Alice gives me an error. (I've attached a text file of the error message, in case that's useful.)

Is it possible to use ACM files in Alice? If so, what steps am I missing? (Obvious, no doubt, but I'm new to Alice.)

Are there ACM files available elsewhere besides the CMU archives? Is it possible to convert BVH files into ACM files?

It would be wonderful to be able to bring motion captured movement into the Alice environment.

Thank you in advance for any help and advice.

PS I didn't mean to use a "thumbs-down" icon on this post - I thought it was a question mark! And now I don't see how to change it.

[DrJim]

Interesting. I suspect like much else in Alice 2.0 (such as Python scripting), this reflects leftover features from Alice 1.0 that were either not continued or weren't fully implemented and debugged. Maybe the CMU team can shed more light on this.

The skeleton file does import and the points show up in the object tree (I did this as a texture import to keep the hierarchy). The errror messages are typical of warnings you get when the imported structure has inconsistances - really can't say what but it would have been amazing :eek: if I had guessed correctly on every choice. But the points seem to be recoginized by the program OK, though I didn't try a lot of movements, etc.

I have no idea what good this is, but I know very little about the subject in general. What seems to be missing is any tie from the points/skeleton to the accompaning video (.asf) file (even though this is listed as a recognized file type). Maybe there is a "switch" in the .alice file somewhere but I didn't see it.

Also the models/motions I saw were far too complex to work with manually, but if there are simpler models, it might be interesting to create poses from the accompaining video on a frame by frame basis. That's certainly within Alice's capabilities, assuming you also have a lot of patience (I probably won't try it.)

[pinckneyb]

Thanks very much for this informative reply. I thought maybe the AMC feature wasn't fully implemented, since I couldn't find any evidence on the forum that anybody was using it; and something so nifty wouldn't get passed up entirely, I don't believe.

In any case, I've gone as far with it as I can with my limited skills. Maybe Alice 3.0? ;)