bkramone wrote:
hi,
i'd like to capture motion of just two hands - is there a way I can either get a "mo cap actor" file that I can load into ipistudio, or a way that I can rig my own file to do this?
It's a little unclear what you're asking. Are you talking about extracing just wrist position or are you talking about capturing full hand motions (wrist rotation, fingers bending)?
If it's the latter, iPi DMC does not do this. Full hand mocap is quite sophisticated and you need hardware specially designed for this task (typically a glove with built-in sensors.) You can merge this data to a full body rig using programs like Motion Builder. As you can imagine, accurate full hand capture technology is very expensive.
If you're just after a 'floating hands' animation--for example, you just want to move around disembodied gloves worn by an invisible man--just parent a pair of hands geometry to the wrist bones of the exported skeleton. 'Rigging' really isn't even necessary to do this. The geometry should be pre-posed of course to minimize that 'paddle hands' look.
If you need to add finger motion to the 'floating hands', you'll want to rig and retarget properly, which gets more complicated of course. Motion Builder works great for this since the hand/fingers controls are already built into the MB rig and ready to animate.
I haven't used Webanimate yet so I don't know if it's as 'easy' (it's all relative isn't it?) in this program.
Hope this helps.
G.
