Adobe Flash Puppet?

[shtick]

I know this isn't really a tech forum but this post is about puppetry.

I've seen alot of 3D applications for digital puppetry. Does anyone know of any methods or peripherals that allow real-time puppeteering of a 2D digitally animated character in a vector program like Adobe Flash?

 

[Buck-Beaver]

I worked on/for a project a couple years ago that did a pilot for a U.S. cable channel called "Suzie Shadow". We developed a system called (imaginatively enough) Flash Puppet. The idea was to create shadow puppet-like animation in real-time that could then be rendered out as Flash.

Show never got picked up, but the system itself worked great.

 

[shtick]

Care to give some details on it?

 

[Buck-Beaver]

What did you want to know?

 

[shtick]

What did you use to control the puppet? How was that control mechanism implemented into flash?

 

[Buck-Beaver]

There were no special peripherals, except we sometimes used joysticks for scenes where characters had to walk a lot. Mostly we used flat, cut-out puppets very similar to regular shadow puppets and a technology called colour blob tracking. The puppets were made out of card stock (heavy paper) and different moving parts of the puppets were colour coded and a video camera tracked the puppet's movement and moved the digital puppets correspondingly. You could use almost any object that was a bright, solid colour to control any of the digital puppets.

It's been a few years, but I'm pretty sure Flash Puppet was built as a Shockwave application using software called Macromedia (now Adobe) Director. I designed the interface and consulted a lot on the design of the system, but I didn't really do any of the programming. It was custom made for the pilot and proprietary; the production company retained ownership of the software and it's not publicly available.

You really need to understand at least some basic computer programming/scripting to tackle a project like this. I've experimented a little with doing 2D and 3D digital puppetry in Blender using Python scripting. Using a program called GlovePIE I can use almost any peripheral to control digital puppets. You might also want to check out Animata and read my Machin-X: Digital Puppetry Blog.

 

[mrhogg]

It would've been Director; it's long been a feature of the app that you can do some good analysis of imagery that you pull in, but Flash doesn't have it. In the most recent version of Flash you can track motion in the camera field, but as far as I know you're just able to get a value representing the total amount of movement on the screen, not on any kind of per-object basis.

I've seen a lot of demos with Director which take advantage of their video processing ability: I've seen a number where the user stands in front of a wall with an image projected in front of them, and they can see themselves displayed in a scene with rain falling down, and as they move, the rain hits them and interacts with them; it's pretty neat.

I haven't heard of the other pieces of software you mentioned (aside from Blender), Andrew, but I'll have to take a peek.

The newest version of Flash has built-in support for IK systems, so technically you can construct a "puppet" in an app, but you're still left with a keyboard/mouse control interface for it. Having the app create a skeletal structure is pretty handy, though (even if it's just in 2D).

 

[Buck-Beaver]

We were definitely not working in Flash. You could output your work as an editable Flash file though, hence the name "Flash Puppet". I believe there was also some kind of custom driver or utility that was used to capture video, process it and send it to the application, but the programmer was responsible for that and I didn't really have anything to do with it.

Flash Puppet was a very simple, easy-to-use system. Once a character was rigged and your physical puppet was synced up in the camera almost anybody could learn to use the software in 5 minutes. It was really cool and I would have liked to do more with it.

I don't use Flash a lot so I haven't played with the new IK features, but Blender's game engine has similar limitations. You can really only control something with a mouse, keyboard or joystick so that's what I use GlovePIE for. You should be able to write scripts in GlovePIE that remap input from whatever device you want to input that Flash will accept.

What I like about Blender is that you can work in 2D, but it's a 3D environment so there are more creative possibilities. Not to knock Flash (which I know a lot of people love to use), but I've discovered in the past few months that it has a lot of limitations in terms of animation and I prefer to work in After Effects or Toon Boom.