Kinect 3D character mesh animation

Question

I am writing with Java and Processing, trying to animate a character with data received from Kinect. I have been successful in creating a stick man that repeats my motion. However, I find that doing a 3D mesh, loaded from an OBJ file is much harder than that. I have been searching all over the internet to find any info on that and could not find anything sensible. I know that it might involve bones and such but, again, there is no library for doing that, no article touching that subject. I would appreciate any help - suggestions, libraries, sources, links..

Answer 1

If you're exporting OBJ files, you're exporting meshes/geometry, not motion/animation data. I recently started working on an animation exporter using Processing and the SimpleOpenNI using the BVH(Biovision motion capture format) file format as you can easily get joint positions and orientation with the library.

I then pondered if maybe somebody already did this (as it's fairly straightforward), and yes,people did already do work on this:

• Brekel Kinect with BVH support, Brekel BVH and Blender
• Kinect data and FBX export draft.

There is room for improvement though. Depending on how comfortable you ware with programming, you might want to start with BVH, since it's a plain text format. The thing that worries me most about this format though, is the fact that is is using Euler angles. Also consider using FBX as it's a more up to date format with more options.

In short, don't use a file format for storing geometry, use one for animation/bones.