Pre-recorded Voice Tracks

[SesameKermie]

Live Puppeteering of a CG character

Perhaps I'm a little off topic here, but since we're discussing puppetry and animation, I thought I read something about a system where the Henson control system was used to control a CGI character, effectively enabling "real-time" animation. Has anyone seen or worked with that?

 

[Buck-Beaver]

I was actually at a lab here in Toronto about a week ago talking to people about a system like that.

I've been working with someone up here who does robotics on a really simple way to do this. The idea is to have a simple puppet rig that gets performed over your head in a defined stage area just like you normally would for TV, except the puppet's position is tracked by external motion sensors and it's body movement is tracked by sensors on or inside the puppet itself. All of this gets fed in to a modified version of Blender (the open source 3D software) which is used to generate a low-res render in real time. Once a performance is recorded an animator (or puppeteer) can go back and tweak their performance adding little details or erasing mistakes before a final hi-res rendering of the performance is created.

Unfortunately it's only designed on paper at this point. I've spoken to people who are more technically inclined than I am and they say the design is sound and can be easily done with off-the-shelf technology. The two big challeneges are money and software. Neither of us has enough experience in software to do all the coding that's needed for something like this. It would also cost a few thousand dollars for the equipment. We're considering applying for an arts grant to try to develop it next year. I'm not sure if it will work, but it's something fun to play with.