After almost 5 years since the start of the project we finally reached a basic armature to track the movement of the whole body, the 11-FullSuit.
The 11-FullSuit is a systema composed by wireless bodynodes, each with the proper supports to be weared. In total they are 11: 2 bodynodes for each leg and arm (8 in total), 2 more for the back (upper and lower torso), and finally a bodynode for the head (mounted on an helmet). Here is picture of all thenodes:
Truth is that we currently have only the hardware up, we have to improve the libraries to properly support it. And obviously there are different challanges related to it. First is that this suit is composed by different type of nodes, RedBear DUO and ESP-12E based ones, which have the sensors in different orientation. Secondly ESP-12E nodes have been oriented differently depending on the support used. For example, the head has the starting position of the sensor upwards, while the forearm will have it downwards.
The fastest approach will be to create the libraries in order to realign themselves depending of which bodypart they are. Luckily this suit will be used only by us, therefore we have the freedom to go for the this approach.
We will think about a more general approach in the future and create specialized classes only for this suit. We might choose to have the bodynode controller class to accept so sort of initial offset orientation parameters to start in this direction.
While we tried to connect all the nodes we found a few faulty ones, and we are promptly fixing them to have all of the 11 working and online. This is not worrying us much, the fixes are hardware and are minor.
Finally having the 11-FullSuit is a very important milestone for us. The reason is that we can finally move a full body armature in a virtual environment, and the possibities are a lot. Our intention is to focus in the animation market. We want to create incredibly realistic animation movements and put them online under a small fee. This has the big advantage to let us use our work on something without having build new nodes.
An animation made with the 11-FullSuit is expected to take few days to be done, instead of months for a manually animated character!
The Unity Asset Store seems to be the perfect place for this.
Once we will have our animations online we will cross our fingers and wait to see the results. In fact, our milestone this year is to make some money with the BodyNodes Project, 1 or 1000 pounds doesn't matter.
For today is everything!
Manuel Bottini Team BodyNodes
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