CAPTURE MOVEMENT FOR MOHO!!

[Rai López]

I think that Moho is the PERFECT program for include a feature like this! Cause of the 2D bones sistem and "muppet" style based animation it'll be specially USEFULL, much more than in other programs (like AFX i.e.) that can do it in "real time" with your MOUSE movement, but is not really interesant cause you only can animate things like layer motion... It'll be possible to see a feature like this in a near (or not near) future? Would be it tecnically possible with actual CPU's? Well, I know that LM will say something like this: "Who knows..."
But sorry for this kind of questions, I only had curiosity...

[musajoe]

This product would be very cool to use with a product like Moho:

http://www.didi.com/www/areas/products/monkey2/

[jahnocli]

...if you're a millionaire! (And, according to the website, the last User Group meeting was in 1997!!!)

But yes, very interesting idea.

[bupaje]

I actually was wondering the other day (brain is always churning) if it might be possible to create a system to use BVH or similar animation files and 'flatten' them. In other words convert or throw out some of the Z depth info or maybe even if there was a way to save parts of the animation i.e. import a bvh walk file, gets converted to a moho format, apply it to a character, play it back and delete or correct any frames that don't look good.

Not sure if this was possible and only mentioned it because of Ramon's suggestion.

[Lost Marble]

I think it would be really difficult to flatten the animation data like you describe. Moho is 2D, so the thinking is that you could just remove one dimension. However, as an artist, you usually want at least a little appearance of depth in a 2D cartoon drawing, otherwise it looks like a grade schooler's drawing.

Once you arrange a character's parts in a 2D plane to give the appearance of depth, I don't think there's an accurate mapping from a true 3D space to that 2D projection. For example, if a character is supposed to be partially turned away from the camera, you might position the further shoulder joint a little bit higher than the nearer one. But that's just an arbitrary position - there's no real notion of 3D there. Moho would have no way of knowing that you intended one arm to appear further from the camera, or whether the character's shoulders were at different heights.

[AcouSvnt]

I'm not familiar with BVH files; are they text readable? If so (and even if not, thought it would be harder), I'm sure it would be possible to do a script to read in the data and apply it appropriately.

In fact, pretty much anything that can be written to a file can be interpreted in whatever way you want by a script, it's just a matter of a.) understanding how the file is formatted, and b.) deciding exactly what to do with the data.

I'm sure a small, external program could be written to do nothing but capture mouse movement over time, and save that as a list of X/Y coordinates, however many per second your desired frame rate is, and then you could use that data to move a layer, or a bone, or whatever. The only problem is you wouldn't see exactly what you were moving, just a cursor on a blank screen ....

[bupaje]

But that's just an arbitrary position - there's no real notion of 3D there. Moho would have no way of knowing that you intended...

Thanks for the explanation. I guess sometime in the future Moho could grow to include tools to speed up and refine animations (which is I guess the appeal of something like BVH) and maybe create a market for built in or 3rd party tools like 'Walk Designer" etc or maybe even some sort of prebuilt characters w skeltons with several animations that you could then modify so you could grab say 'FatMan1' and change the face etc and use some of the prebuilt animation like walking etc, tweaking it a bit but certainly speeding up producting.

Anyway, sorry if I ramble a bit as I'm an 'idea guy.' I think MoHo is fantastic and the support and community great as well.

[chucky]

Bumping old thread, almost 9 years old, ye gads!
Can we not now collect the 2d from 3d motion data from Kinect to drive our rigs?
I was looking for a bone key reducer and found this VERY old topic, seems technology has caught up to this.