Tisch Asia Animation and Digital Arts MFA program - Motion capture class

Video notes from last class: KInect Motion Builder. Creating a simple 3d scene with clouds and camera movements.
from Jean-Marc

Video notes about drawing a face with particles in Maya and Motion Builder
Part 1 shows how to draw a an animated cartoon face
Part 2 shows how to create a spherical face made of particles. A copy of the video and the related files are on mocap12..

How to design an installation centered aroud the viewer/user. The following notes and tutorials cover elements of the vewer's experience from the user interface to the space of the interaction.
The notes and tutorials are
- user interface
- designing the space of the installation
Sound is an important addition to the viewer's experience. This includes footsteps, loud body gestures and playing a virtual music instrument,
- interactive sound with Kinect

Animating a intreactive screen can be done with boxes coming out of the wall or the soft way with moving shapes. Examples of virtual wall and screen are listed below
- an interactive wall using KInect and Maya
- an interactive screen using KInect and Maya
- interactive particles using Kinect and Motion Builder
More abiut video textures and 3d content. Let's start with adding live video on the screen
- Adding live video in Motion Builder
- a 3d interactive garden in Maya

Motion capture and sounds. Kinect driving sounds in MB This video tutorial shows an example of motion capture with sounds. Kinect and Motion Builder trigger sounds. The setup is first tested with a mouse input before being replaced by Brekel Kinect and motion capture.

Interactive particles - part 1: Creating a scene from Maya to Motion Builder from jean-marc gauthier
This video tutorial covers interactive particles in Maya and Motion Builder. It shows how to create an array of simple planes and a video billboard in Maya. The interactive particle emitters for the fog are set up in Motion Builder. This will help the group working on the Fog project. Files are available on the server under mocap-10.

Video notes:.

Interactive wall part 1.

This is a simple talking head controlled live by motion capture. This 3D interactive animation is in Maya using OpenNI and Kinect. The flat toon look and feel of the puppet is rendered with PaintEffects. Video by JMG

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Tutorial

This week assignment is an interactive 3d garden. It will allow you to explore the creation of a small dynamic ecosystem where the viewer can interact with several animations at the same time. For example walking in the grass, clouds and wind blowing, flowers growing.

You can develop the 3d garden in groups since it worked well for this week assignment. Each group will work on a version of the garden., Students from each group will present in class their own contribution to the team. I posted a very detailed tutorial is available on the mocap blog. For example, Some students can choose to design interactions with Kinect and motion capture, refining the viewer's experience of walking on the grass. Others will create original designs and plants by animating 3D brushes in PaintEffects. You can animate growth. You can experiment with the endless possibilities of animating Maya attributes for shapes, colors, positions, scale, light and cameras.
Tutorial
The last part of the tutorial covers blending brushes and creating your own PaintEffects brushes.

Please take the time to revise this week assignment (remove the grid inside the visuals, add lights, colors on grey volumes, show the viewer in action during the mocap session in the video), create the two pages presentation for your portfolio.

This tutorial by JMG shows how to create live animations that can be controlled by an actor or a dancer. The goal is to transform dynamically compositions of 3d plants. Kinect is used as a motion capture device. In this case a 3D brush stroke was cloned and parented to a Null object from the Kinect OpenNI plugin.

Movements of the actor are captured by Kinect and transform plants created in PaintEffects.

3D model sculpted dynamically in Kinect and Maya.

I think that Kinect is a wonderful sketching tool. It helps create ideas and concepts very fast with almost no setup. This is a video scrapbook of ideas for motion capture.
Tutorial how to use Kinect with Motion Builder
Experiments with live 3D modeling in Maya. The 3D model is sculpted dynamically in Kinect and saved in Maya. Video by JMG

Kinect driving expressions in Motion Builder. Translating of the skeleton's arm equals scaling the purple box. Video by JMG

Kicking virtual boxes using physics in Motion Builder. Video by JMG