NI mate Blog

Character template for Cinema 4D, User actor plugin for Isadora

Posted on by Julius Tuomisto

We’ve received news of two very useful user made extensions to NI mate. The first comes from Josh Johnson over at VFXdaily and covers a ready made template that makes it easier for you to rig your character correctly to the motion capture data coming from NI mate. Get the download by following the VFXdaily link and watch the video here:

The second one comes from NI mate user Armando Menicacci and promises to be very useful if you’re planning to use NI mate’s skeleton tracking together with the popular VJ software Isadora. This one can be found on our own NI mate user forum. Armando writes: “I made a user actor for Isadora to receive through OSC in localhost the 15 body parts sent in the “basic” form from NI mate (verified through ni-mate version 0.93)”. We are almost completely sure that the plugin will also work straight with NI mate v1.0, but you might want to poke Armando on the forums (either ours or the Isadora forum thread) if you’re having problems.

NI mate price + R&D roadmap 2012

Posted on by Julius Tuomisto

First of all some good news regarding the price of an NI mate license. For buyers located outside of the European Union region the license can be sold without VAT (unlike we were previously made to believe). For EU citizens the price will still include 23% Finnish VAT. All this means that outside of the European Union, a single license of NI mate (and all future updates) will cost you only 166USD (with the -20% May sale that we’re currently offering). For those who already bought a license: we will refund you the extra that you paid.

If you have a VAT registered company within the EU and would like to buy the license to your company, just contact us at sales@delicode.fi for billing. If you’re purchasing more than 10 licenses in one go you can also ask for an offer and get a further a percentage off the total price.

As promised we’re releasing the following Research & Development (and release) roadmap for NI mate. As this has not been set in stone yet, we’d like to challenge you guys in to talking about what would make NI mate worthwhile for you to purchase a license. For those of you who already have or are going to purchase a license, your word means even more to us so please do tell us what you think!

NI mate roadmap 2012

Planned:
v1.1 Multi-user support for exact & controller data
v1.1 Multiple simultaneous feeds through Syphon and the FreeFrameGL plugin
v1.2 Recording and playback of captured data
v1.2 Controlling NI mate parameters & changing profiles through MIDI & OSC
v1.3 More MIDI & OSC controller options
v1.3 BVH-exporting

Further research:
- Head/wrist orientation tracking
- Support for multiple sensors
- Improving tracking by using multiple NI mates
- Face detection & other means of identifying users
- Integratin other input devices to improve the tracking (for example smart phone with accelerometer)
- Speed increases from multithreading and from using the gpu
- (Kinect for Windows support)
- (Linux support)

NI mate web shop opened, May sale -20%

Posted on by Julius Tuomisto

Edit 9th of May 2012: We were under the false impression that VAT would need to be included in non-EU purchases as well. We were informed that this is not so and have now corrected the price for non-EU citizens. This means that for the month of May, a license of NI mate for a non-EU purchaser will be only some 128euros or 166USD. Read more here.

We’re extremely pleased to announce that after a few delays we’ve now opened the NI mate web shop. A single or dual sensor device licence can be purchased from the Paypal enabled NI mate web shop. The price that we have fixed for NI mate is €160+23% Finnish VAT (roughly totaling at 256USD at today’s exchange rate). We hope this price point will make NI mate very good value for money, while still giving us enough resources to develop the software much further in the future. In order to kick off the sales we are offering NI mate for a nice -20% off until the end of May. You can best access the shop directly from within NI mate (Mac OS X screen), this way the correct Kinect serial number will get passed on to the web form:

NI mate launch screen, Mac OS X

We have decided not to burden the logistics of our tiny startup by trying to offer academic licences for now. This means that we do not currently offer extra discounts to students, staff nor universities themselves. However, if you represent a university, company or other entity that would like to purchase at least 10 or more licences in one go, or could consider becoming an official reseller for NI mate in your country, then please do contact us for an offer at sales@delicode.fi.

Through the past three months we’ve been lucky to meet a lot of enthusiasm and creativity from a growing user community. We hope that with the opening of this web shop (and hopefully many purchases) we will be able to meet all of your expectations also in the future. As always: Thank you for trying out NI mate! :)

PS. If you’re wondering what’s the point of having a dual licence. If (like us) you have multiple Kinects lying around, a dual licence will run NI mate with both of the sensor devices. You don’t have to worry which one to attach. We can also create licence files for even more Kinects. If you would like to purchase a licence for more than two Kinects, please get in touch with us at sales@delicode.fi.

NI mate version 1.0 released + web shop coming

Posted on by Janne Karhu

We are extremely happy to announce the release of NI mate version 1.0. Apart from offering new functionality, we’re also happy to offer an official NI mate plugin for Autodesk Maya. A video tutorial is in the works, but if you want to get started straight away check out the instructions on the plugin page.

With NI mate v1.0 we are moving NI mate from free beta into a commercial product. This means that within the week we will be opening the NI mate webshop for purchasing a license to the product. The price (which we think is very affordable) of a license will be announced when the webshop opens.

While we hope that many of you will think that our little software is valuable enough for you to purchase (thus supporting further development), we do not want to alienate the many fantastic users we’ve gained by offering NI mate free in the beta phase. For this reason we will continue to offer a free trial version of the product. If you participated in the beta phase then your beta license key will automatically work as a trial key as well. Please note that the trial mode of NI mate has not been feature crippled, but will display a few trial notices and shut itself down after an hour of use.

New features:

  • Syphon support for OS X: the current live view is now streamed automatically through Syphon for easy video input to other software. A Syphon to FreeFrameGL plugin for OS X can also be downloaded from the Syphon website. The application name for the Syphon feed is “Delicode_NI_mate” and the server name is “Delicode Server”.

  • FreeFrameGL support for Windows: the current live view is now streamed automatically through FreeFrameGL for easy video input to other software. For this you will need the NI mate FreeFrameGL plugin.

  • Multiuser support: track & send data for multiple people at the same time.

  • Autocorrect orientation: the tracked coordinates are automatically straightened to be level with the ground even if the Kinect is tilted (does not work with the Xtion PRO as it doesn’t have an accelerometer).

  • A bit better skeleton tracking smoothing algorithm.

  • Select the screen the ghost is drawn on for multi-screen setups.

Bug fixes:

  • Fix for a bad MIDI bug that caused NI mate to use wrong MIDI ports and crash in the worst case.

  • After a crash NI mate could be left in a un-runnable state due to the sensor becoming marked as still being in use. The user can now choose to ignore this warning and continue with normal operation.

Thank you for all the many beta testers out there. Once we settle on the prizes, a draw will be held among all the beta testers. Winners will be announced on this blog in a few weeks! Thank you for trying out NI mate!

Head over to the download page to get NI mate v1.0!

More tutorial goodness + Phantom making waves

Posted on by Julius Tuomisto

Here’s a great tutorial on how to use Sam Welkers’ fantastic Joint Targeter tool. The Joint Targeter was made by Sam in order for himself and others to make it even simpler to use motion capture data coming from the NI mate in Cinema 4D. You should definitely check both the tutorial and the tool out:

In other cool news the 100% Kinect-shot music video Delicode and Studio Lumikuu made together for the Finnish electronic act Phantom has been making waves in notable music media (and even outside of it). The software created in order to make the music video (a separate experimental tool that is in early development) will be touring with Phantom this coming summer. The band itself is absolutely amazing and you definitely listen to the other tracks as well. Here’s Phantom’s Scars once more:

Cinema 4D motion capture tutorial by Sam Welker

Posted on by Julius Tuomisto

A lot of people have been making requests for a tutorial on how to hook up NI mate with an existing rig in Cinema 4D. We’re now extremely happy to showcase an awesome tutorial on the subject by Sam Welker from ThinkParticle dot com. Although the tutorial doesn’t cover all the steps, it answers most of the basic questions related to the procedure. Lets hear it for Sam!

Delicode makes an exclusive deal for NI mate with the WWF!

Posted on by Julius Tuomisto

Edit 11th of April 2012: Please note that this post was our Aprils Fools gag, although the awesome Panda video by Lassi Haaranen is totally real. I just we had to improvise something funny for the first of April! :)

We’re proud to announce that Delicode has struck a unique deal with the fantastic World Wildlife Fund (WWF). NI mate will be transformed in to a one-off tool to control an army of mechanized pandas in a future fund raising effort. This means that NI mate will be made unavailable to the public in a few months.

Recent studies performed in Shanghai, China seem to indicate that upon confronting a cute money gathering panda over a human, people are over 10 times more likely to make a charitable donation. This has led the WWF to seek methods of using the so-called “Puppy Eyes” technique in a wider fund raising effort. Meanwhile, recent DARPA funding for Delicode has produced a next-generation mechanized panda with two high powered lasers installed in to the pandas eye sockets. So the next time you’re thinking of walking past one of our fund raising pandas, think twice:

NI mate v0.93 released!

Posted on by Janne Karhu

Due to some rather sizable internal and external changes in NI mate we decided to exted the beta period for at least a couple of weeks, so here’s NI mate beta version 0.93! However it is still likely that this will be the final beta release of NI mate before we reach v1.0.

You can watch a quick comparison of NI mate v0.92 and the new v0.93 here:

So what’s new (detailed list)

  • New organization of the general, skeleton, quantized and exact tabs.

    • All of the skeleton controls are now under one tab, so if you only do motion capture you don’t have to worry about all of the other settings.

    • Exact and quantized data are now under the name OSC controller and MIDI controller as this better reflects the intended usage.

    • New screen coordinate space option for skeleton and exact data, which sends the x and y coordinates without transforming them into real world space.

    • Skeleton data has it’s own OSC ip and port separate from the quantized and exact data’s OSC ip and port. So now you can send the skeleton data to one application and quantized/exact to another application.

    • The settings that were previously under the general tab have now been moved to global preferences. These are now stored separately from the saved profiles and always stay the same. You can find the new preferences from the application menu on OS X and the Edit menu on Windows.

    • Note that due to these changes old settings and saved profiles will undergo a conversion that tries to match the old settings to the new ones. The conversion should be pretty painless, but some settings may change so a check through the settings is in order after the conversion. This conversion is also applied to old exported profiles on importing.

  • New activation modes like “wave”, “raise hand” and “stationary”. Also a way to deactivate the user through a gesture. There’s a 5 second delay after activation/deactivation before the user can deactivate/activate so that you can also use the same pose for both purposes.

  • Better logging, that allows to see the sent MIDI and OSC messages, so that you know what to expect in the receiving program. Note that NI mate can create quite a large amount of messages, so keeping logging on for the MIDI and OSC messages running constantly is not recommended as it can slow things down a bit.

  • Changes to the NI mate settings now take effect immediately, so you don’t need to click the apply button any more. The apply button has been replaced by a save button that saves the current settings as the default settings which are loaded when NI mate starts.

  • The Depth View tab is now Live View as you can view the rgb feed along with the depth view. We also added an option to view the pure depth view and the ghost image in preparation for the much requested Syphon and FreeFrameGL support :)

  • Initial support for the ASUS Xtion Pro Live device. Some functionality like the led and tilt functionality won’t be available on the Xtion device as it doesn’t have a led or a tilt motor. On the cooler side the device doesn’t require external power.

  • A number of bug fixes.

Head over to the download page to get NI mate v0.93!

NI mate featured in 3D World Mag issue 154

Posted on by Julius Tuomisto

I’m excited to say that NI mate was featured in the previous issue (April issue, #154, page 27) of 3D World Magazine. To be honest I have no clue how this one escaped me as I do receive and read the magazine regularly, but I’m just happy Davis Sorenson pointed this one out to us. The 3D World Magazine editors had this to say: “After watching the demo video Delicode released recently, it’s clear that NI mate still needs a lot of work. That said, the software looks very promising. Definitely one to keep an eye on”. Spot on!

Heading to Frankfurt Musikmesse 2012

Posted on by Julius Tuomisto

In case you are heading to the Frankfurt Musikmesse and would like to get together (over a beer?) to talk about NI mate, MIDI, OSC or anything in between, please feel free to send me a message through our info email. I will be available at the fair through Wednesday to Friday this week. While you’re there do check out our friends’ stand: EKS is presenting at Booth 5.1 A08 and they’re showing off their turntable magic together with the new DJ’ing software from Audio Artery called The One: