This is a short I’ve made for an animation contest about W. A. Mozart. I planned a plot but the piano-playing thing took too much time, so he just plays the piano.
I consider it unfinished, but I won’t work on it anymore, so I placed it in Finished Projects instead WIP forum.
Download mirrors:
Mirror 1
Mirror 2
Mirror 3 (you need a download manager for this one, otherwise it stops downloading at 2-3 mb)
Format: AVI, MPEG4 (h624) video, MP3 audio, 7.8 mb
If you can’t see the video, get VLC
The piano-playing is very detailed and accurate, you worked it very fine!
Wicked sick!!!
Man that’s amazing!!!
Tell me more about how you animated hands… is it manual or scripted (script would be nice if you want to make some other music but …hehe )?
One of the best video i’ve seen out of Blender… again congrats!
Really nice!
I’m also interested of how hand animation was done.
if you would start working again here are my 2 cents:
add wrist motion. mozart here plays 3 phrases two phrases with 5 notes and a phrase with 8 notes. before, and between each phrase the wrist should go up and down in a very smooth way, the fingers following.
the beggining of each phrase should be marked by excessive finger motion, i mean: the finger playing first note from the phrase should attack from better height.
remember, that you can raise second finger alone, by itself, but 3rd, 4th and 5th are connected to each other so when you raise 3, 4, or 5th, you need to raise other two a bit.
finger motion attacking a key is not a up down motion. it’s a mini-grab motion with is pre and post motions.
piano players sit generally on the half of the … chair. Don’t ask why.
consider adding after-motions of elbow, but remember
that elbow doesn’t force movement of other limbs, it only tries to follow (in piano playing technique)
just two cents from a piano player :]
Yeonil
ps. as for the left hand: playing this pattern normally would imply rotating motion with an axis on 4th finger , so that the motion of third and first fingers could be smaller. notice that the motion of those two implies that 2nd finger moves also, nearly as much as third. Don’t forget about wrist. it should align smoothly on every attack of the fifth finger, so that there is a straight line between forearm and the left end outline of the hand (more-less), and then smoothly come back to the relaxed position on the 3 attacks of 3rd and thumb.
Yeah, I’m a piano player too. I agree with all you said, Yeonil, but I will not improve this animation. I’ll make another, cooler and more original animation instead.
About the hands movement:
For the fingers going to keys and keys themselves, I made a bash script which converts a matrix of notes from a rosegarden file to a python array, and a python script to make the IPOs of keys and 10 cubes going back and forth. The fingers IK then have a copy location constraint driven by cubes’ vertical movement. The IPO blocks are created and assigned to the object manually; I’m very pissed off with that since there’s no way in python to assign them manually. Also, when the fingers are not affected by the copy location constraint, are also animated manually, so don’t collide with other fingers and keys.
For the hands, I animated them by hand, looking frame by frame where it should be so the fingers doesn’t bend funny. After I animated half of the animation, I noted those problems you mentioned (but had only one day to finish it). Some of the problems can be solved without invalidating the rest of the animation, but some doesn’t: I have to change some things in the IPO making script. I also tried to animate the hand automatically, but far of the desired result when worked, and with headaches when not.
For the tempo changes, I used time IPOs, which allow me to change later the tempo without changing the sync with manual animation. Before that I tried other methods during some time which failed. The time IPO script also is more simple than accounting the tempo when creating the finger/key IPOs.
I tried to imporove the crappy left hand movement, but it’s a pain in the ass unless I improve the script and redo all the animation. I learned that hands push more than fingers themselves when playing the piano.
amazing :o
Hope your next project is some Hendrix song 
import Blender
from Blender import *
ob=Object.GetSelected()[0]
ipoTest=Ipo.New('Object','TestIpo1')
curve = ipoTest.addCurve('LocX')
curve.append((1,0)
curve.append((4,8)
###################
ob.setIpo(ipoTest) # assign/connect the IPO to the currently selected object
####################
Mike
I forget to say that I choose which finger touches each note by changing a controller value in rosegarden. There are some fingers that gone wrong in the last moment but I didn’t correct them.
It seems people have trouble downloading the file, downloading 2-3 mb only. I’m uploading the file in other sites and going to put it as mirrors.
Oh, thanks Mike_S!!! I don’t know why I didn’t see it in the documentation :eek:
You’re welcome. I find it’s not easy to navigate the Blender Python docs, especially when you’re trying to find out how to do something 
Very cool animation !
You might be interested in this thread (MIDI import)
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=78403
And there’s this thread and blend file with a “virtual” piano in the game engine
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=79251&highlight=piano
Any chance of posting the .blend file under Creative Commons … or whatever terms you’d like ?
Btw, I’m a beginner keyboard player and started to try to learn that song a couple of times. So far I can play the first 8 bars really slowly
Was that you playing the song, or did you use a pre-recorded MIDI file ?
Mike
Thanks
You might be interested in this thread (MIDI import)
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=78403
I didn’t see that thread until today, I’m cheking it out. At first it seems difficult to assign a lot of different notes.
And there’s this thread and blend file with a “virtual” piano in the game engine
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=79251&highlight=piano
Cool!
Any chance of posting the .blend file under Creative Commons … or whatever terms you’d like ?
Maybe, after I improve my script.
Btw, I’m a beginner keyboard player and started to try to learn that song a couple of times. So far I can play the first 8 bars really slowly
Was that you playing the song, or did you use a pre-recorded MIDI file ?
Mike
I can play that song more or less flawlessly but slower than the video. I’ve used a MIDI file taken from http://www.piano-midi.de/ and used Rosegarden to arrange the parts and to select which finger plays each note. I then export to Csound format, which is a very simple format with enough info for my purpose: start, length, pitch and velocity of each note, and also tempo changes. With a bash script I convert it to a python array which is imported in my python script. The sound is syntetised by Qsynth (a FluidSynth GUI) and recorded with Rosegarden (so I don’t need Ardour for this)
Judging the arrangement of the notes in the midi file and the tempo changes, it’s not live-recorded, but manually arranged.
Very Nice!!! Great camera movements and lighting. Looks great!
4 stars.
i found this very inspirational
(i also play piano)
it jumped slightly, might just be the google version! (downloading full now!)
very nice, no crtits
plz write a script so we can make mozart playing modern music!
Maybe youtube would be good?
I tried it, but it gets too out of sync.
I suggest, one more time, the great Videolan VLC media player. It doesn’t need aditional codecs.
(I use linux however, I prefer mplayer. It’s windows version is called ‘Media Player Classic’)