Hi all,

I was just wondering if Ipi are going planning on incorporating a basic hand gestures library into their software anytime soon?

I've played around with Daz 3D and Iclone, and they're already there, but I don't fancy having a monster workflow.

I'd love to see something like that, so you could use your RGB video feed as reference, apply main gestures ie: pointing, fists etc...and then Ipi
would inbetween the frames. I know you can manually do it, then cut and paste in gestures etc.......but I'm a preset fan as it saves valuable time.

On a second note - are there any Motionbuilder users out there who could let me know if I could do something similar with that? (Motionbuilder 2013)
That's where all my BVH's will end up.

Many thanks as always!

Hi
The answer strongly depends on your meaning of "soon" :) We plan to implement the hand gesture library as a part of "finger keyframing" feature. This feature is close in our roadmap. However, from today's perspective, it seems to be available at the beginning of 2013. Still as free update to v2 customers.

Yes, you can set up pose libraries in MB. (I use 2011 but it should be the same for 2013.) I haven't used this feature for hands but it should work for hand poses. However, I'm not completely sure you can transfer a pose library to reuse in another scene--I think you can, I just haven't tried it myself yet. (Now that I am thinking about it, I'll go check--I will need this feature on our next movie.)

It will be nice when iPi DMC gets it's own built-in library feature. :)

G.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

I'm working on my pilot from Jan - Aug 2013, so the idea of having some basic hand gestures for Ipi in Q1 2013 sounds good to me! As I'm a Standard v2 user, I look forward to the update! :)

Thanks to all, as always for your advice.

Carder

Version 2.2.0.144 includes some enhancements that are helpful in pose editing, though not a full-functional library:

• Save pose from the clipboard to a file
• Load pose from a file to the clipboard
• Paste pose from the clipboard to all frames in ROI
• Navigating through skeleton using the keyboard

The pose above may be contain only selected bone and/or its descendants.

Just a few thoughts for users creating hand poses in the current version of iPi Studio.

The current version of iPi Studio doesn't have a Pose Library but you might be able to do something like this: One very old 'Pose Library' trick I used to do in 3D was to create all my hand poses in negative frames of my timeline. After I got my 'library' set up, whenever I needed a particular pose, I would got to the negative frame that contained the pose I needed, copied the keys for the selected hand bone plus decendents, and then pasted it to the hand bone plus decendents at the frame where I wanted that pose.

Obviously, we don't have negative frames in iPi Studio, but you might paste the poses starting at frame 1 since it's not likely that you will be exporting animation from the lower frames.

I'm not sure there is a way to transfer the poses from project to project, so you may need to re-create the poses in each project.

Hope this is helpful.

G.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

New commands for saving/loading a pose to/from file are intented just for that - to make a sort of a global pose library. We plan to implement more convenient library management in later releases, including thumbnail previews, standard poses for hands etc.

Ah! All right then.

It didn't immediately 'click' to me what the Load and Save to Clipboard feature meant. Obviously, that system should work much better than my 'workaround' suggestion.

This update just keeps getting better and I haven't even used it yet. :)

G.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

That would be amazing. I use the following in Daz Studio - http://www.daz3d.com/shop/everyday-hands-poses-for-v4-and-m4

Perhaps you could look at creating everyday gestures that conform to the finger diameters of...let's say, a standard Genesis figure? With parameters in Ipi to adjust and save as if the characters' fingers are fatter.

Hand keyframing released in v2.3.0.146. Currently there are 3 standard poses for hands: default (same as in T-pose), relaxed, fist. Also there are useful commands to transfer the right hand pose to the left hand, and vice versa. See wiki article.