Hi
I'm using IPI with 6 ps-eye cams. Nice quality, although it does not recognize palm position at all. OK, I can use PS move to make it possible, but I would like to have possibility to key palm orientation as part of fingers gestures- I tried, and it doesn't work. It seems quite obvious solution for scenarios when you don't have or don't want to play with ps move. Is there any work-around ? Or maybe you can add this possibility?

Hi, rogalag.

To animate palms and fingers, I think, will fit Leap Motion (with Brekel Pro Hands... or similar). But that after the recording of the body with iPi. For a simple palms animation with PS Move controller, you can stick it to the back of palm (maybe, make the glove with it). This reduces difficulties.

if you attach a Move controller to the back of a glove, it will bump into the top of your wrist when you bend your hand upwards. When I was experimenting with this a few years ago, I wound up adding a foam riser to the back of my glove and attaching the Move to the riser--an inch and a half or so should give enough clearance between the hand and wrist. Alternatively, you can remove the Move controller's housing to reduce its size. Another user did that a few years ago and it seemed to work well for him.

Personally, I find it fine to just hold the controllers during a performance but you need to maintain a firm grip. This can affect a natural performance but you'll get used to it and be able to compensate during the performance. You can't record the finger motions during body capture anyway (not with Recorder I mean) so there's usually not much point in freeing up the fingers during body capture.

The hand pose system in iPi is actually quite good. If you set up a small library of poses, it should take care of most situations. You can, of course, merge hand mocap captured separately with another program--that's actually fairly common practice.

But, IMO, if you need hand animation that's very specific or subtle, you're better off keyframing that in an animation program--it will be quicker and probably more accurate if your character needs to interact with a prop or something. (Cleaning up finger mocap just doesn't sound like a lot of fun to me.) :)

For my projects, I mostly rely on iPi's Hand Pose system and hand-keyframing those occasional 'specials' in my animation program.

_________________
Greenlaw
Artist/Partner - Little Green Dog | My Demo Reels (2013,) (2015,) (2017,) and (2019)

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

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I agree, the iPi finger gestures work very well and quickly applied and if you don't know, you can slide the little ramp right or left to increase/decrease the timing.

My guess is, they probably didn't add palm positioning support due to the fact that you will have to take your animations into a 3D editor for clean up and it's much easier to use layers to add palm movement there, if you don't use Move controllers, but there will be more work to get the naturalness throughout.

I personally think also that the Moves are a better choice, but keep the USB dongle on an extension away from your computer or electromagnetic fields to minimize interference.

Yes, a consistent steady grip is needed, or taping or wrapping them to the palm, or top of the hand using a small soft foam riser is also a choice.

Also, you CAN hand key areas of the animation in iPi, it is just way more tedious and has to be done by single frame steps and as the last step in your workflow, or any auto-correct procedures will remove them, this method works ok for small corrections before export, even when using Moves.

If one day iPi introduces layer adjustments in the program, that would be fantastic.

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Yes, this can be important around computers and large TV's, even when you're initially setting up the controllers. I run a separate USB cable out to the room where we record and attach the Bluetooth dongle to that. The simple fact that the dongle closer to your capture space may also improve reception quality.

_________________
Greenlaw
Artist/Partner - Little Green Dog | My Demo Reels (2013,) (2015,) (2017,) and (2019)

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!