EzMocap

As a game developer, I need good and realistic character animations to take my games to the next level. I simply got tired of searching for specific character animations and not finding a good fit. Since I lack the skills of an animator, creating them manually was out of question. I could buy a motion capture suit, but spending thousand of dollars to buy a suit was also not an option. Therefore I decided to develop my own motion capture suit - enters EzMocap!

EzMocap system is a software plus a low cost 15 wireless sensor "suit". The sensors contain an IMU and a magnetometer.

EzMocap suit

Since the animations that I was getting out of this system positively surprised me, I decided to further develop EzMocap and try to put it in the market. My intent is to give indie developers like me and small game studios that cannot afford expensive mocap suits the possibility and the fun of recording their own animations.

All character animations of Dimeland were created with EzMocap.

The suit consists in body straps that hold the sensors in place (hand sewn and made of velcro and felt), a lycra shirt and shorts (bought in a sports store - I then sewed some velcro and straps to them) et voilà.

I used Kicad to design the sensor circuit board and Blender to create the model of the sensor case that I then 3D printed at home.

Sensor design

The software has 4 modules:

• Preset Manager - create/edit model dimensions presets
• Live View - record motion data
• Edit View - post processing, small edits and export options (FBX and EZMAR formats)
• Animation Viewer - view exported animations

EzMocap software modules