Tactile character animation?

[robcat2075]

I recall about 10 years ago someone was selling a stop-motion armature that transmitted it's joint movements to the computer. They called it a "monkey" or something like that.

[Quatermass]

Well, if I remember correctly, something like this was used for the movie "Dragonslayer', and "Return of the Jedi" to create motion control performances for the creatures (dragons and the rancor). The puppeteers would animate a rod puppet, and then the computer would play back that performance (using the rod puppet), but at a greater speed, so they could get motion blur and a greater sense of weight. Then they used something similar for the 'bugs', in "Starship Troopers", where animators recorded motion via a puppet, again. However, the difference was that the recorded animations drove computer generated creatures.

I beleive that Phil Tippet was the guy driving all of these endeavours.

[bobzilla]

Tippet's was GoMotion. I believe it was invented to add blur between frames so the stop motion wouldn;t look as jerky as it did, no matter how well done it was.

It was going to be used in Jurassic Park as well, until someone had another idea...

[Cronholio]

Tippet's was GoMotion. I believe it was invented to add blur between frames so the stop motion wouldn;t look as jerky as it did, no matter how well done it was.

It was going to be used in Jurassic Park as well, until someone had another idea...

Not quite. Tippet invented go motion, true, but in addition to that, when it became clear they were going to use CG dinos in Jurassic Park, he helped design the DID - Dinosaur Input Device. ILM could make the dinos, but they weren't sure they could animate them convincingly. The DID was an aramature you hooked up to a computer that a stop motion animator could use to animate a character on a computer using the methods they were familiar with.

Here's a paper on it.

http://graphics.pixar.com/DinoInputDevice/paper.pdf

The monkey is a humanoid version that came later. We still have one at work.

http://www.inition.com/inition/product.php?URL_=product_mocaptrack_digitalimage_monkey&SubCatID_=51

[bobzilla]

Well, yeah. That's the other half of the story, basically. They were going to use go motion, though, and then, yes, the DID was implemented.

There were several Go Motion tests, as well. And of course, Tippet made stop motion animatics for certain scenes, too.

[Gentle Fury]

I recall about 10 years ago someone was selling a stop-motion armature that transmitted it's joint movements to the computer. They called it a "monkey" or something like that.

lol, we had a monkey when I was at full sail. Cool device. You could move it and it would move the 3D data.

[fattyLees]

For those of you who used those rigs, how well did it atually work? I worked on starship troopers 2 and heard about those rigs but I thought after all was said and done that it didn't turn out as well as they had hoped.

[kap13]

What was the results of using these devices? Did they work well?

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