Mocap Set Up

Full body Mocap setup will deliver more accuracy and better performance.

Place a character on stage

1. Press both Menu buttons to go to the Asset Library
2. Point at a character to highlight it, then use the Trigger to pick the character up.
   You will now return to the stage with your character in hand, whether you hold the Trigger, or not.
3. Click or release the Trigger to place them.

Note - Characters will collide with the ground for easy placement, but if you keep pushing down, they will sink beneath ground level.

Calibrate your head and hands

Before you can motion capture, FirstStage needs to map your body dimensions to the puppet's skeleton by aligning your head and hands to the appropriate head and hand bones.

Note - You only need to do this once, as FirstStage will remember your physical dimensions and align it to any puppet you select from then on, no matter what size.

1. With the Navigator selected, point at the character and 'Perform' will highlight above them, then press the Trigger to enter Mocap Set Up.
   You will arrive facing your character, with a red target over their face, and a floating white target where you are looking.
2. Calibrate your head
   Stand straight and look at the red target (align the two targets) until it turns green to calibrate your height.
   Your eye height will be displayed on the left UI panel.
   Click the Recalibrate button to repeat the Head set up process.
3. Calibrate your hands
   For normal human characters, your controllers should be correctly seated in your hands, but if they need adjusting, use your other hand to proximity grab a controller (an orange ball will appear when ready to grab), and position it to better align with your hand.

If you are wearing waist and feet trackers, there are additional hand-style alignment mechanisms to get those correctly aligned, and a button to swap feet over if you have the trackers on the wrong legs. See Full Mocap.

Such alignments enable FirstStage to set an offset between where your tracker is, and where the tracking bone on the character is.

Setting Posture

Partial mocap just tracks your head and hands and uses the puppet’s IK to manage how the body flexes and moves between those points.

We have three postures to help the engine know the positional relationship between the head, hands and floor.

• Standing - Here the feet will try to remain on the ground directly beneath the head. So if you steer animate the puppet, the legs will perambulate beneath the head, meeting with the ground, but if you physically climb onto a chair whilst in VR so your head is not the original distance from the floor, the head will lift up and your puppets's body will stretch to it's toes trying to reach the ground beneath the head.
• Seated - Here the legs and waist are not mocapped and the head assumes it starts directly above the waist. Upper body movement then drives the mocap, with the head driving the spine down to a fixed waist position, and the hands driving the arms up to the shoulders.
• Prone (lying down) - This is much the same as Seated in that the legs and waist are not mocapped, but here the head is assumed to be approximately level with the waist, and the hands are ??? when mocap starts.

But if you want to accurately capture where your body parts are with full mocap, then you need the additional trackers or a smartsuit, and we are delighted to say that we support Rokoko Smartsuits, which now includes hand and facial capture!