2D Motion capture

Anyone remember that game on the amiga called Prince of persia?

I want to use the technique they used to make 2d animated sprites. What would I need to look at and what software would I need?

I have PSP for editing and a webcam. I am not planning to spend money on extra software.

I tried using windows media encoder to capture video but I had trouble moving to individual frames in the media player. I also tried Virualdub but this does not show live picture and it can not load wmv.

So any suggestions/links/tips?

It's called 'rotoscoping' rather than '2D motion capture'.

For decent results, you'd need at the very least:

* A camcorder
* A video capture card

I can't see a webcam being suitable for this kind of work... or any implementation other than its intended use, really. Those things just aren't good enough quality.

Ah, I asumed rotoscoping was the technique for getting rotations out of film.

A camcorder is out of my reach. But, I have found the quality of webcams are good enough when the lighting is good. I bought several 100watt bulbs for this.

Anyway I just found a ok method for getting frames into psp using a free tool called Hypercam. This tool records anything non-hardware accelerated on the desktop. So I guess I can use this.

The only problem is being able to grab the correct frames. Which is proving difficult. Not to mention polishing the images.

Below is the first set I captured. 4 frames. A rough version.

**


Now to find my karate book :)

Seeing how there isn't much detail in those sprites - wouldnt it be much cheaper and less time consuming to just render an animated model and create sprites with the captures?

Knowing the trouble it takes to make a model + animating it I find this is much easier.

have a good artist to visualize it seem a good way - i never capture anything before in order to make sprite.

QuickTime Pro (which costs a little) can save out individual frames of a video file. I'm sure there are other programs that can do this too for free.

If you're into doing stop motion stuff, you should check out http://www.animateclay.com/capture.htm It's a free tool to capture single frames, and even worked with my old webcam.

A good and free tool to use for rotoscoping is http://cinepaint.sourceforge.net/ CinePaint. It's based around Gimp, but specialized to paint on moving images (wire removal, rotoscopy etc.). Wow....just noticed it's available on Windows now too.... :-)

Hehe...the last time I did rotoscoping, I rigged a Super8mm projector to show single frame, and used some mirrors, a drawing table, glass and animation paper. Did some fun stuff with old Chaplin films. :-)

Ragnar

Well what I did when I needed each frame was just wrote some code in Blitz to playmovie, and a saveimage every frame after the flip.

That stop motion tool is great fun :D

Cheers!

Another technique is to use a relatively inexpensive digital camera. Make sure it has the option to take continuous frames and shoot away. The limiting factor would be how much storage memory it has. You can then off-load the individual frames and process them.
I'll see if I can use the wife's cam and post an example...

There is a WFW Dll in the code archives, written by Panno. You could use it to grab single pictures.