IKinema has launched an update to its motion capture plugin for Maya, IKinema Action 2

Designed to enhance the Maya tool-set, IKinema Action 2 is the fast real-time solving solution for rigging, retargeting, marker solving, streaming, animation and motion capture re-work.

Leading studios, such as Framestore, Disney and ILM, have had great success in integrating IKinema Action into their pipelines.

More recently, the technology has been used in other products: The full body IK solver in modo 601, released yesterday, is based on IKinema technology.

Press release excerpts

Industry heads are turning to IKinema for its powerful full body solver, and advanced animation processes. Leading studios, the likes of Framestore, 20th Century Fox, Disney, and Industrial Light & Magic have since integrated IKinema Action to help with their motion capture, marker solving, and retargeting work. Now, Audiomotion Studios, UK motion capture experts are fast realizing the advancements made to their pipeline using IKinema’s technology.

Action enhances Maya’s toolset, and outperforms other solvers for speed and robustness. After realizing the artists’ need for increased flexibility to bone manipulation, StretchIK became an important addition to the newly released 2.0.

Always looking to advance their pipeline, Tim Doubleday, Audiomotion’s Creative Director comments. “In the past we’ve relied on MotionBuilder for our body solving from markers and more recently we’ve added Vicon’s Blade software into the pipeline. These solutions work well but still limit some body movement, mainly getting the arms and clavicles to move naturally as well as the spine and neck.”

Audiomotion makes use of Action’s advanced features for a one to one match of an actor’s skeleton. The spine and neck stretch capabilities come into play where the rig behaves more naturally, and especially for hard to solve poses.

Doubleday points out, “A classic example of this and one which is very common in videogames is when the actor is in a squat position with their shoulders hunched forwards. There are a number of things that are affecting the rig, the position of the hips and the bend of the knees. There is also a lot of compression on the spine and finally there are the clavicles which are arched forwards.”

He found that traditionally individual input was required to achieve better results, for example, manually keying hip position, adding pull to arms to bring clavicles forwards. He goes on to say: “By using IKinema’s full body solver and the new stretch feature, this becomes less of an issue.”

Doubleday’s testing of 2.0 beta found StretchIK a time-saving addition. Scalable bones increased the look of his animation, and aided the solver for complex moves, “Our goal is to try and match what our actors do as closely as possible and IKinema takes us one step closer to achieving this.”

Enabling the user to perform direct changes to skeleton and animation assets within Maya’s viewport, Action provides a simplistic and manageable environment. Smooth and speedy integration are key ingredients to pull a studio to its feet, taking Audiomotion only a couple of weeks. Feeling like he’s just ‘scratching the surface’, the more Doubleday uses Action the more ideas are revealed, “I’ve recently being animating fingers using IKinema, and we’re looking to use it for real-time streaming from Vicon Blade.”

On comparisons between IKinema to other products, Doubleday comments, “We’ve used both MotionBuilder and Vicon Blade in the past but IKinema offers a lot more control and flexibility when it comes to full body solving. We’ll definitely offer it to our clients and continue to use it internally.”

For more information on IKinema Action 2 visit www.ikinema.com

Ikinema was shortlisted for the Plugin of the Year Award in our CG Awards last year