Not sure if this has been discussed before but I think it would be a nice feature to be able to bind different hand poses to controller buttons. It would simplify the hand animation process if you could set some harsh key frames during recording.

I'm not sure what you mean exactly but it sounds like you're describing what you can already do with existing tools in Moho.

For example, using Smart Bone Dials, you can either take a fully animateable hand and use a dial to morph the hand into at least two other poses by dialing left and right, or you can use the dial to switch between any number of Switch Layer hand poses, or you can combine the two methods and use one dial to switch between different animateable hands that can be animated to multlple poses, and another bone dial to animate the currently selected hand drawing between those poses.

Or, if you have a bunch of hand poses in a Switch Layer, use Alt+Ctrl Right-Click over the hand art to call up a list of other hands to choose from; or you can use Alt+Shift Right-Click over the hand art to select the Switch Layer and then use Alt+D and Alt+C to cycle through all your hand poses; or you can use the new Switch Selection window to do this visually. Any of these methods saves you from drilling down into the Layers panel for the actual Switch Layer.

Or, you can just make your hand poses as animateable hands and use the Regular or Morph Actions list to insert hand gestures and poses, using point animations, bones or both.

Any of these methods rely on preset hand poses or animations and they are all reasonably interactive. With proper planning and setup, it's really fast to animate many hand poses in a scene. I regularly create a 10 or more hand poses for a character, which should cover most situations. Depending on your setup, it's usually pretty easy to add new hand poses to a rig as the situation arises.

If you look through the sample content, especially content from 10 through 12, you can find a variety of ways to assign hand poses to controls. With a little experimentation, you can find many more.

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

What I meant is a way to utilize the buttons of PS Move / Wii Motion to take key frames for hand poses during recording. Mocap Studio has this hand pose functionality: http://wiki.ipisoft.com/Getting_started ... se_library

So, if there would be a way to store the key presses in Recorder, they could be used in the Mocap timeline for this purpose or something else. A simple example that I had in mind: whenever I've got Move triggers pressed, my hands are in fist pose, in rest otherwise.

Oh, duh...red-faced and very sorry!

It was late, I was super tired, and I completely lost track of which forum I was in. I was obviously talking about a different animation program which isn't even remotely 3D or mocap related. Please disregard my post from last night. Everything I wrote above is all nonsense here! :)

Now that I've had some sleep and coffee...

Re: the actual subject matter (and being aware of where I am,) yes, that's a very interesting idea. You might have a limited set of hand poses assigned to the controller but even if you have only three or so poses to choose from, it might still be helpful during performance. (i.e., relax, fist, spread, and maybe point?)

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

Watch a one minute excerpt on Vimeo now!

Yeah, I think one could learn some button bindings quite quickly. That way the hand poses should be more natural when they're captured together with the body motion. Also, the video doesn't help much when adding finger poses afterwards since the actor is holding controllers all the time.

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When I record performers, I have them wear black light material gloves and I put velcro on the palm and on the appropriate place on the Move, then I use black sports tape to wrap the index finger to the Move and then around the wrist and over the rear of the Move, because the weight of the Move causes the glove to sag if not.

Doing this they can completely release their grip to an open hand and the Moves stay perfectly in place, even on fast motions.

There is probably another way to get the same effect, but this way is fast and easy to get set up and keeps Moves very tight to the palms.

It is fairly easy to create your own hand pose library inside iPi and manipulate the reaction speeds in and out, unless doing very aggressive finger actions, typing, playing piano or guitar let's say, the fingers during natural motion don't move all that much independently of one another, and most capable finger tracking program processes are awful anyway and create more need for clean up than they are worth.

You can also use the same method to attach the Moves to the top of the hand, using an open cell soft foam block between, or it irritates the top hand bones, but this releases full use of the fingers and palms for holding props and can see more clearly in the video during tracking and still be able to use fingers for working the program while recording if you are doing the action recording yourself.

Possibly iPi devs can bind the Move buttons to perform what you are asking, but would be pretty limited I would imagine, like you say, maybe open, fist and relaxed, or point.

iPi would have to answer that though.

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