Real-time markerless motion capture for Blender: a webcam streams full-body SMPL-X poses straight onto your character. Built in collaboration with Corridor Digital.

Free and open source.

Point the engine at a video and it streams live SMPL-X poses. Here it drives the standalone skeleton viewer on two of the repo's test clips — source on the left, the streamed pose on the right:

_{These clips are the repo's own test fixtures (tests/fixtures/video/), run through the real capture pipeline. The viewer draws approximate bone lengths; inside Blender the same stream drives a full SMPL-X character, shown step by step in the Getting Started guide.}

1. Download the Windows installer from the latest release and run it — no administrator rights needed.
2. Follow the Getting Started guide — it takes you from a clean machine to a character moving on your webcam, with a screenshot at every step. About 20 minutes, most of it downloads you can leave running.

You are guided inside Blender too: a Getting Started checklist sits at the top of the PoseCap panel and keeps the capture buttons disabled until you are ready, so you can't click into an error.

Early development — first installable preview. See the PRD for scope and roadmap.

Two components, one pipeline:

• Blender extension — panels and operators inside Blender: start/stop the live stream, record mocap to the timeline, capture single poses, manage SMPL-X body models.
• Engine bridge — a separate GPU process wrapping the PEAR pose-estimation model (single image in, SMPL-X parameters out, real-time rates). Streams poses to Blender over a local socket.

Blender animators who want believable body animation without mocap suits, markers, or external mocap software. Corridor Digital's production artists are the founding users; if you have Blender, a webcam, and an NVIDIA GPU, it's for you too.

RTX 20 series and older CUDA GPUs are untested and unsupported. Linux support for the engine bridge is on the roadmap; macOS is not currently planned.

Two processes, joined by explicit contracts:

1. The engine captures webcam frames, finds the person and estimates their full-body pose on the GPU, and streams those poses to Blender over a local connection.
2. The Blender extension consumes the stream on a background thread and applies poses on the main thread at up to 30 FPS — without wiping your existing keyframes.
3. Poses apply pelvis-locked: monocular depth estimation cannot recover trustworthy world position, so world translation stays out until a solid software approach lands (camera tracking is the leading candidate — see the roadmap).

Step-by-step diagrams for every flow (live streaming, capture jobs, install) live in doc/workflows.md; binding structure lives in ARCHITECTURE.md.

Two separate licenses apply — the plugin's and the body models':

• PoseCap itself is free and open source: GPL-3.0 for the Blender extension (required for Blender API linkage), Apache-2.0 for the contracts, core, and engine-bridge libraries — decided in ADR-0006.
• The SMPL, SMPL-X, and FLAME body models are licensed by the Max Planck Institute for research (non-commercial) use. They are never distributed with PoseCap — not in this repo, not in the installer. Each user registers on the official MPI sites and accepts the license terms personally; the plugin's setup wizard then automates the download using that user's own account credentials. The illustrated setup guide walks through it.
• Commercial production use of the body models requires a commercial license from Meshcapade, independent of the plugin itself being free.

• MVP — live webcam streaming with device selection, recording live mocap to keyframes, timed capture, batch image processing, SMPL-X model management, Windows installers.
• Next — Fast SAM 3D Body engine adapter with MHR-to-SMPL conversion, AMASS animation import, FBX/Alembic export, Linux engine bridge.
• Later — world position via camera tracking, pose-accuracy eval harness, multi-camera estimation, retargeting to custom rigs, face/expression capture.

Full detail in the PRD.

• ARCHITECTURE.md — layers, boundaries, IPC contracts
• doc/workflows.md — sequence diagrams and flowcharts per functionality
• AGENTS.md — operational guide for contributors and coding agents
• doc/product/PRD.md — product scope, metrics, roadmap
• doc/reference/ — the papers and upstream projects this builds on

See CONTRIBUTING.md — setup from clone to green tests, the project map, commit conventions, and the rules CI enforces. Short version: most of the codebase (contracts/, core/) needs no GPU and no Blender to work on; never commit model files or weights; one concern per signed-off commit.

• Dean / Corridor Digital — concept and the production use case driving this
• Alê Alvaro (@alexandremendoncaalvaro) — the PoseCap rewrite: architecture, implementation, and installers
• PEAR (Wu et al., IDEA) — the pose-estimation backbone
• Fast SAM 3D Body (Yang et al.) — roadmap engine backend
• Meshcapade / MPI SMPL Blender addon — the addon lineage the POC started from
• SMPL-X body model by MPI for Intelligent Systems