Posted March 19, 2016
Greets!
As part of a game course that I am taking online, I have been doing some research into various software packages to do both 2D and 3D animation. Two of interest that I've found are Reallusion's CrazyTalk Animator (for 2D, apparently flash animation) and iClone PRO for 3D animations.
I'm not the artistic type, so I kind of rely on the customization of the characters these packages provide --and having worked with (extremely simple) key-frame animation and editing before, it tends to be a somewhat tedious process to get something nice and fluid with regards to motion.
I did some Google research on motion capture and found that there are several solutions out there, many being very expensive software solutions and usually requiring special camera set-ups, hardware, special suits or tiny studio areas. There is a solution out there using the Kinect input device, but I don't own the hardware and would prefer to avoid the investment if possible.
So, my search brought me to try and get something more basic, specifically 2D animation from video using a Webcam, but there still seems like there's not an 'easy' and clean way to do this (at least not anything for which I could find a low-cost solution already provided).
However, I did run across an application called EyesWeb, which looks as if it started off as a research project and became a research platform. Having played with it a bit, I must say, it is not for the feint of heart, as it is quite complicated to use and the amount of information I could find (at least in English) was sparse.
That being said, it apparently looks as if there is the ability to do motion capture for 2D animation from video, provided that it is shot in a way conducive to generating obvious points that can be translated into a set of points that could be somehow imported into Adobe After Effects or applied to a skeleton for animation purposes. However, I cannot quite get there. I've created a "patch" which can take camera input, run it to generate "best points" for tracking and display the camera's output on one of several different monitor types, but have yet been unable to convert those points into objects that I can render to see the actual "tracking".
Has anyone worked with this software before who might be able to help me or perhaps could suggest a pointer to someone who may be doing some type of Webcam or 'video' motion capture "on the cheap" for the purposes of doing computer animation?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Cheers!
As part of a game course that I am taking online, I have been doing some research into various software packages to do both 2D and 3D animation. Two of interest that I've found are Reallusion's CrazyTalk Animator (for 2D, apparently flash animation) and iClone PRO for 3D animations.
I'm not the artistic type, so I kind of rely on the customization of the characters these packages provide --and having worked with (extremely simple) key-frame animation and editing before, it tends to be a somewhat tedious process to get something nice and fluid with regards to motion.
I did some Google research on motion capture and found that there are several solutions out there, many being very expensive software solutions and usually requiring special camera set-ups, hardware, special suits or tiny studio areas. There is a solution out there using the Kinect input device, but I don't own the hardware and would prefer to avoid the investment if possible.
So, my search brought me to try and get something more basic, specifically 2D animation from video using a Webcam, but there still seems like there's not an 'easy' and clean way to do this (at least not anything for which I could find a low-cost solution already provided).
However, I did run across an application called EyesWeb, which looks as if it started off as a research project and became a research platform. Having played with it a bit, I must say, it is not for the feint of heart, as it is quite complicated to use and the amount of information I could find (at least in English) was sparse.
That being said, it apparently looks as if there is the ability to do motion capture for 2D animation from video, provided that it is shot in a way conducive to generating obvious points that can be translated into a set of points that could be somehow imported into Adobe After Effects or applied to a skeleton for animation purposes. However, I cannot quite get there. I've created a "patch" which can take camera input, run it to generate "best points" for tracking and display the camera's output on one of several different monitor types, but have yet been unable to convert those points into objects that I can render to see the actual "tracking".
Has anyone worked with this software before who might be able to help me or perhaps could suggest a pointer to someone who may be doing some type of Webcam or 'video' motion capture "on the cheap" for the purposes of doing computer animation?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Cheers!
