Brekel Body v1 – FAQ

  • What is Brekel Kinect Pro Body?

Brekel Kinect Pro Body is a Windows application that enables 3D animators to do realtime body Motion Capture of up to 2 people from your living room or office using a Microsoft Kinect sensor.

 

  • What is it not?

It’s not a highend motion capture tool, meaning there will be some restrictions in the motions you can capture. For example it works best when facing the sensor and allowing a clear view of all your body parts.

 

  • Which drivers are used?

Brekel Kinect Pro Face uses the Microsoft Kinect drivers, the installer will automatically download and install these for you, or you can find them yourself here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/develop/developer-downloads.aspx

 

  • Does it support capturing using more than sensor at a time?

Currently only a single sensor can be used at a time, you can however run the software more than once and choose which sensor to use if you have more than one connected.

 

  • Which sensors are supported?

Both the ‘Kinect for Windows’ and ‘Kinect for XBox’ sensors are fully supported, the Asus Xtion and PrimeSense Carmine sensors are not supported.

 

  • What are the differences between the ‘for Windows’ and ‘for XBox’ sensors that are relevant?
    • ‘for XBox’ is officially only licensed by Microsoft for developers, ‘for Windows’ is licensed for commercial and consumer use
    • ‘for Windows’ supports nearMode which can track between 40cm and 3m distance, regular mode tracks between 80cm and 4m (mainly interesting for face tracking)
    • ‘for Windows’ adds control over the video camera’s exposure and whitebalance settings

 

  • Which sensors are supported?

Officially Microsoft only supports the ‘Kinect for Windows’ sensor for users, and the ‘Kinect for XBox’ sensor only for development purposes.
Technically the software happily works with both types, so the answer depends in which category you consider yourself to belong in.

 

  • Which features are only supported on ‘Kinect for Windows’ devices?
    • near mode (allowing you to get closer to the sensor)
    • video camera properties (exposure, whitebalance etc)

 

  • What are the minimum hardware requirements
    • ‘Kinect for Windows’ or ‘Kinect for XBox sensor’
    • Power supply for the Kinect sensor
    • Microsoft Windows 7/8
    • 32 bit (x86) or 64 bit (x64) processor
    • Intel Core i5 or faster (or equivalent) processor
    • Dedicated USB 2.0 bus
    • 4 GB RAM
    • Graphics card with OpenGL support

 

  • The application crashes on startup

On certain graphics cards/drivers (NVidia Quadro cards have been reported) the rendering of the pointcloud can be problematic.

As a workaround you can use the shortcut in your Windows Start menu labeled “noVBO” to disable some of the internal OpenGL accelerations that may cause the crash.

 

  • Why don’t you have an app that tracks both Body and Face simultaneously?

I have experimented with this, however currently a single Kinect does not provide enough data to do this well enough.

The limited resolution does not provide good results for the face tracker when standing at a typical distance for the body tracker.
And having only a single viewpoint means you will have to keep looking at the sensor so your face stays visible, which would severely limit the range of motion you could perform.

 

 

  • I’m having trouble recording video files

Video output is dependant on which video codecs are installed on your machine.
When the ‘Ask for codec’ option is disabled the ‘XVID’ codec will automatically be used if available.

If you’re having trouble with codecs I can recommend the K-Lite codec pack and/or Xvid:

http://www.codecguide.com/download_kl.htm

http://www.xvid.org/

Remember to also install the x64 version of the codec if you’re using the x64 version of Brekel Kinect Pro Body.