So I've been on a Rokoko Smartsuit Pro II for about a year and it's been fine for body capture, decent data, cleanup in Blender takes some time but nothing crazy, retargeting to my character rigs works well enough. The one thing I've been avoiding the whole time is fingers. I've just been hand-keying all finger animation, which is tedious but at least it's predictable.
Finally borrowed a friend's Rokoko Smartgloves last weekend to actually test them properly. And honestly? I'm not sure they saved me any time.
The curl data for natural hand shapes is actually pretty solid. Relaxed hands, pointing, waving, that kind of thing comes through clean. But the moment you get into thumb opposition (pinching, gripping objects), the data gets noisy in a way that's weirdly hard to clean up. The gloves don't have sensors on every phalange so you're getting a lot of interpolated guesswork on the intermediate joints, and it just slips. Also the wrist blending between glove and suit data in Rokoko Studio still produces rotation artifacts at the joint boundary that I couldn't fully eliminate.
I ended up spending longer cleaning the glove data than I'd have spent just keyframing the same sequences from scratch. Maybe I'm doing something wrong? I've seen people swear by them.
I know Xsens gloves are supposed to be a lot better, but they're priced for the Xsens ecosystem and that's not a conversation my budget wants to have. I've also seen people use a Leap Motion Controller for desktop/stationary performances, but obviously that doesn't travel well with a full-body suit setup.
Is anyone actually happy with their budget glove solution for game-quality mocap? Or is hand-keying just the honest answer here and I should stop chasing it?
