Yes, I always loved puppets as a kid. Yoda is probably my all time favorite that Frank Oz brought to life. In fact if you compared traditional puppets to VR, I'd say each has its own good and bad points. This is a VRChat full body capture. To think that Hollywood level abilities are coming to consumers means this kind of thing will eventually be used to make films.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUhAMRzcBVI
From a stop motion perspective, they could be quick ways of making animatics and even to use for pre-animating scenes by literally acting them out in real time. Even if you have a stop motion puppet with odd proportions, you can digitally hop into that puppet in VR, act out your scene and use that as your guide in Dragonframe or Stop Motion Pro. I am pretty sure Aardman animated (roughly) all of Chicken Run in CG to pre-plan the entire film.
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Yes, I think that eventually costs will come down and someone will figure out a way to turn this into something anyone can use. Probably the best app I know for animating CG characters is Mindshow. Take a look:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DsM1SKJORg
It's more like puppeteering but has some advantages over SMODO currently in some ways. Especially since it's instant.
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Yes Dan, SMODO is an interesting project that we briefly talked about on the live show. It's a lot like the Dinosaur Input Devices from Phil Tippet but using a webcam to capture the movements. There's the one video out there explaining it (sort of) here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls_xsjUJUik
I think if you want to animate in CG, it's not a bad idea to use. If you have a flying rig everything would translate fairly nicely. Only I don't see a way for changing face expressions, so I don't know if that's something they plan to add. I also kinda wonder how they do head turns and things with twisting motions. Either way I do think the tech has some limits, maybe that's why they haven't done an update for a while?
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I've placed all our previous interviews in our Articles section here to make it easier to find them:... Show more
I've added 15 image galleries to the site in honor of Will Vintons passing yesterday. Will was a major influence in the creation of this web site so... Show more
It's that time of year. You know, sending invitations, getting together with the family, eating Turkey and Ham. Yes, Thanksgiving is fast approaching and as of yet we have never had a Thanksgiving theme.
If you're not from the USA
this link tells all about
the holiday where you can get some ideas.
To enter our challenge just create a short animation around the theme. Post your YouTube URL and tell a little about your entry. Once the five weeks is up we will watch all entries on our live show. The winner will get our e-book
Secrets of Clay Animation Revealed
this time.
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I've updated several parts of our site. Hopefully squashing some bugs in the process! A new thing you can do is add polls to our page here in the... Show more
I just updated the forum plug-in. They updated the code last night so this might be why links didn't work. If possible make sure to add the http://... Show more
Just a friendly reminder to everyone. This is technically only a 4 week challenge (since this is only for graphics), but if anyone needs more time let me know.
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