The new motion tracking feature in Blender 2.61 is awesome. But it can also be used like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o6LQvDvJ-g&context=C2b85aADOEgsToPDskKk84_5Qaig1OhEUKKPKlJx
for capturing hand movements
and this:
for capturing face movements too! These are just preliminary tests on cartoon figures, but I think there is some potential here…
Wow, looks great. I thought only the camera tracking was in 2.61.
Did the hand give you very much trouble?
did you 2d track the markers with tomato?
:eek: i can barely stand…
This is cool… can you do a quick tutorial on this? I’m not sure how this works…
Hmmm. I’m not sure I can create a full-blown tutorial, but here are some simple explanations.
For the face capture, I used the video from YouTube and loaded it into Blender and went into the new Movie Editor mode. I put markers on all the points including the shine on the nose and the eyelashes. It would have been better to have a few more markers.
The steps were as follows:
After tracking all the marker points, select them and Link Empty to Track for each one.
Set the camera data to Blender
Put the camera in front of the markers with zero rotation.
Solve for the camera - this takes several minutes. Wait for the “bundling” to finish.
Click on each empty and in Properties->Constraints, click Constrain to FCurves.
In the NLA editor, click on each red snowflake (???) to change to a yellow-colored marker
(2.6 is WAY different then 2.49 here…)
I then wrote a script that converts the empties to an armature.
Now the second step is far more complicated. I already have a character rig that I have been using for a long time that has a pretty good face rig on it that uses shape keys.
I augmented that face rig to have many more shapes than I have had before. So I Appended in the face capture armature and then used that armature to drive my OTHER armature which in turn drives the shape keys for the face!
Here’s a picture:
The face capture rig is on the far right. It drives the face rig on the left, which in turn drives the shape keys on the character.
For the hand capture, the first part is nearly identical as the face capture to create an armature. The second part is also similar, but this time the handcapture armature directly drives the hand armature which then drives the shape keys for the hand.
Whew.
Mind. Blown.
I give it a week before someone announces a paid ebook on how to do this… Andrew Price, are you up for it? Heck, if I had time now, I’d do it…
Wow, very impressive :eek: And a very nice hand model 