Home | Download/Install | Tutorials

3D Puppetry: A Kinect-based Interface for 3D Animation

Beginner Tutorial: Adding Backgrounds

Back to the Tutorials.

For virtual scenes, we use Google sketchup models, which we export to .dae or ply files and place in the kinect_tracker/files/backgrounds/ folder. Our system uses the ASSIMP library for loading models and we often run into difficulty correctly displaying textures from Sketchup-exported .dae files. We found the best solution is to:

1. Find a simple Sketchup model.
2. Export it to a PLY model.
3. Manually color it using MeshLab. We also use MeshLab to rotate and translate the scene model so it aligns with the performance space in our system.

To add a scene model to the system, modify these launch-file parameters:

• scene_names. Simply append the name of the file to the list.
• scene_scaling. If you didn't use MeshLab to scale the scene to match your puppets, enter the scaling factor here.
• scene_brightness. Some scenes have dark textures or colors that look incongruous with the puppet models. Add a value from 0.0 to 1.0 here to add an extra ambient light that only applies to this background.