Ithaca College's Motion Analysis Lab is a state of the art motion capture facility, but the data collected is intended for kinesthetic analysis. Ithaca College's Center for Faculty Excellence sponsored this summer research project to determine if this data could be used by animation majors and others in the Park School of Communication.
C3D data is a very basic form of animation that collects the locations of points on the motion capture suit as XYZ data moving across time. Each point is independent of the other points. In order to use this data to function as a skeleton more familiar to 3D animators an armature has to be built that locks to some points and points bones at others. An example skeleton being controlled by C3D data points is seen below.
The real final goal for this effort was a tutorial on the process, that way other faculty in animation could judge the viability of teaching this process in a course. This research was the impetus for the Park School to buy the application Shogun which automates this process. My tutorial on how to rig a Blender armature using C3D data is below.
