[Dennis] is on YouTube with his channel “Made By Dennis,” but for the record he is a maker, not a V-tuber. On the other hand, his latest project– creating a profesisonal-level tracking rig with DIY IR cameras and a whole lot of moxie–does mean he’s now equipped to make the move to the prestigious, high-status world of pretending to be an anime girl.

That is of course not why he did it. Like most projects around here, the motivation was more a case of “I wonder if I can…”– in this case [Dennis] wondered what it would take for him to pull off the same sort of optical motion capture, or MoCap, that is used in Hollywood studios. Optical mocap has the advantage of being very precise, able to track things at high speeds, and not being in any way limited to the human form like the slew of AI-assisted methods hitting the market right now. The disatvantage is that you need to place markers on any part of your subject you want tracked, film them from all angles, and process a whole lot of pixels. In [Dennis]’s case, it ended up being about four billion. Keeping in mind that actually locating those points in 3D space is dependent on knowing exactly where your cameras are: if you want sub-millimeter precision, your cameras need to be fixed with sub-millimeter tolerance. It’s a big project, hence a long video, which is embedded below.

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