Jitter version of Animata

    Anthony Palomba
    Jan 25 2013 | 5:53 pm
    For those of you not familiar with Animata, it is a cross-platform open source real-time animation software for live performance.
    Here is a video clip http://vimeo.com/664556
    I was wondering if anyone had explored the idea of putting together something similar in Max. At the end of the video, you can see how they are doing the animation. Basically they build a skeletal model and texture map images on to the model. Then animate vertices with audio input. Does anyone have an example that does this? Another exciting idea would be to add jit.phys objects in the mix. That would give the puppets very natural movements.
    I welcome peoples thoughts and feedback
    Anthony
    • Tobias Rosenberger
      Jan 25 2013 | 7:30 pm
      I did a quick & simple installation for kids last year, where i used the sceleton data from the kinect, scaled it a little bit and mapped videoplanes to some of the joints.. I also integrated a physics 2d-patch posted by matmat (box2d or similiar), where i just replaced the camera input part with my resulting animata-like Panda (painted by Liu Fei) and textured the falling shapes...
      http://www.n-minutes.org/#!festival-project/c1wkn
    • Anthony Palomba
      Jan 25 2013 | 8:13 pm
      Looks awesome. Do you have any simple examples you would be willing to share?
    • Tobias Rosenberger
      Jan 26 2013 | 4:24 am
      Hi anthony,
      this was my first use of the kinect ever, i worked on it only short time and everything inside is a total mess... if i will use something similiar in the future, i can clean everything up, and post it then to the max wiki together with some other stuff... but this takes some time, have to do some other stuff before..
      but basically this was just a crude mixture of existing patches:
      - first i build the basic setup of all my textures (videoplanes) very close to Jitter Recipe 45 (Humanoid)
      - then i used Kinect-via-Synapse (which I wouldn't use anymore, but jit.openni)
      - i calculated the rotations from the Kinects sceleton joints and mapped them to the anim.node objects
      - i added some scaling and a one frame delay so that i could always check if there were unwanted huge peaks/jumps in the incoming kinect data and filter them out (it seemed to me that there were some noise problems with the Kinect especially with the foot joints, which jumped sometimes randomly)
      -> the resulting 2d-"puppet" from these steps i rendered into an matrix
      - this matrix i put as it was first on a "fullscreen"-Videoplane in the main physics render context, lumakeyed with an background image
      - second i downsampled this matrix and made it b/w (rgb2luma), and replaced the camera input of the box2d patch posted by matmat with this matrix
      - i used the collisions attribute of jit.phys.world to trigger some sounds
      - i gave the falling shapes some textures
    • Tobias Rosenberger
      Jan 26 2013 | 8:08 am
      also definitely have a look into Jitter Recipe 50, Branching!
    • Anthony Palomba
      Jan 26 2013 | 9:38 pm
      Thanks tobiasros for the detailed explanation. I will start digging into things.