Friday, October 27th, 2017 Posted by Jim Thacker

IKinema releases Action 5.0 for Maya


Deep Silver Dambuster Studios’ first-person shooter Homefront: The Revolution. The firm has just adopted Action, IKinema’s mocap solving system for Maya, alongside its LiveAction and RunTime technology.


IKinema has released Action 5.0 for Maya, the latest update to its plugin for streaming and solving mocap data within Maya, adding live motion capture tools developed for sister product LiveAction.

The release promises to enable users to retarget and clean live data within Maya in real time.

Incorporating tools developed for the Unreal Engine edition of the tech
The update introduces real-time toolsets developed for LiveAction, IKinema’s mocap solving system for Unreal Engine, into its Maya counterpart.

According to IKinema, the move was prompted by the increasing number of visual effects facilities integrating game engines into their motion-capture pipelines.

“We’ve seen a spike in post production studios preferring to adopt game engines to their animation pipelines for their ability to handle heavier content loads and faster render times,” said CEO Alexandre Pechev.

“We quickly realised that by introducing LiveAction’s mocap and retargeting tools, as well as fine-tuning components of Action [we could give] Maya users … a real-time platform to perform a wider range of tasks.

Solve, retarget and clean mocap data inside Maya in real-time
The update optimises the plugin’s core architecture, delivering “twice the speed” of Action 4.0.

According to IKinema, the performance boost is sufficient to enable real-time solving and playback of mocap data directly within Maya, including retargeting the live data directly to characters in the viewport.

ACP, the plugin’s automated animation cleaning pipline, also now works in real time, enabling users to clean up common errors like foot slippage, intersections or noise on the fly.

The IKinema solver itself has also been updated, leading to better “quality, stability and consistency”.

Pricing and availability
Action 5.0 for Maya is available for Maya 2016+ on Windows only. Mac OS X and Linux versions are in development. It incorporates interfaces for streaming data from Vicon, OptiTrack and Xsens mocap systems.

A new node-locked or floating licence of the software has an MSRP £890 (around $1,170), although the software is currently available at a discount.

Read more about Action 5.0 for Maya in IKinema’s online documentation