Mocap Puppetry

Hi, I'm thinking of looking into Mocap (Motion Capture) Puppetry basicly because even though equipment is expensive you would never need to worry about foam wearing out and rebuilding and the cost of building a cast of characters. Here's my idea on how it would work. Make a foam puppet skeleton, very simple and put motion capture markers all over it in 3rd dementional and the digital puppet would be designed through Mudbox and operated with MotionBuilder (both Autodesk softwares), The only problem is that you would need to buy the tracking cameras and stuff seperately. It's really expensive but I really want to make an indie film doing that kind of stuff. It won't be complete CGI animated because it would be operated like pro puppetry skills and stuff and captures in real time.

Anyone ever figured stuff out with digital puppetry? If so please send me a PM or reply. I love to learn more about it.

Hi Mupcollector,

It's cheaper to go with the foam puppet. I've done a lot with motion capture and puppetry (http://brianwindsor.com/ACCAD/digipuppets/index.html). To try to do it on the cheap, I'd look into using an XBox Kinect and hacking it. You'll have to develop some computer skills, but there are already people that write the software to hack it. It shouldn't be too much of a job to get it to track markers. I'm not sure about it interfacing with MotionBuilder through the Kinect. I think I remember someone writing an exporter for Motion Builder. If not, there's probably a way to take the output and translate it to something that can be read by MotionBuilder.

I hope this helps, and if you have any other questions about mocap and puppets, let me know, and I'll help if I can.

-Brian Windsor