USB posable mannequin !!!
polycounter lvl 19
http://youtu.be/0Ny7xmCGu80
Will be trying to find one of these as soon as they are out.
QUMA is rather like an artist’s figure-drawing mannequin with sensors in the joints that report all the articulations through a USB cable. Appropriate software can then position a character’s rigging to match, which seems like it would be both faster and more intuitive than dragging bones around a screen with a mouse.
Will be trying to find one of these as soon as they are out.
QUMA is rather like an artist’s figure-drawing mannequin with sensors in the joints that report all the articulations through a USB cable. Appropriate software can then position a character’s rigging to match, which seems like it would be both faster and more intuitive than dragging bones around a screen with a mouse.
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Anyhoo, I don't think its all that useful. Its a cool toy. But I reckon it would only slightly speed up posing. Plus you'd need a separate models for hands and face, etc. Or you'd have to do it the "old fashioned" way of posing them in the software.
As for animating. It would be like stop motion and would take ages. Also you'd have no accurate control. So keying a walk cycle that loops would be near impossible without tweaking in software anyway.
Also...once the model is posed and you move it no matter how slight. You'll never be able to return to the original pose exactly.
Also, also...with mocap and now the stuff with kinect starting to appear. I doubt this is very useful or cost effective tbh.
nice toy though. Might have use in augmented reality gaming...
Yeah, if it was cheap and 3-4" I'd prolly have one on my desk.
This is pretty nice to pose our characters and do cool renders. i think Celsys will sell it, and if you know apps like comic studio, it won't be so expensive.
For me, this is like a figma toy
I don't know, it's a super niche hardware product - the Microscribe "pen-on-an-arm" digitizer runs around $7,000 - $10,000. I don't think it will be that crazy but I could see $200 - $500.
And the mannequin's design is soooo mech fan awesome, the wires out the back! Love it! ^o^
We must think this toy is aimed to mangakas.
well...true. But I still dont think its a tool any animator would use if they had the option of mocap or kinect. Might be good for getting down some animatic stuff but final animation..I dunno.
Posing is, imo the quickest and easiest step in all the modelling to rendering processes. Once a model is rigged and weighted properely, posing is easy.
It is a cool object/gadget, and I would love to have one. But I dont think its practical as a tool.
Plus the designers missed a trick. It should be slightly bigger and look a bit more like this, then it would have a double purpose. Not that i've ever felt the need to buy one of these either like.
to me, this argument sounds a bit like "i can already paint well with a mouse/tablet, why would i need a cintiq"
if you're more comfortable doing it the way you do it, fine. but for a lot of people this will probably be much faster and more intuitive.
to each their own, though
so stances and stuff like that will always have the right center of balance
How stable is it in odd positions? like the passing position of a run cycle or some tip-toe ballerina pose? I see people holding this thing in one hand straining to reach over to the mouse to click a button and capture a pose.
It doesn't have a gyro so you're still stuck animating the root node/Center of Mass, no swimming or superman poses?
What happens when you're posing it in the 3D app, does the physical model update?
What happens when it falls over and ruins your pose?
This solves one of the easiest things to solve already when animating. No one really has a problem interacting with the models... If they do, whoever rigged it up sucks at their job...
This does nothing to help with timing.
This does not account for squash and stretch which even in realistic animations helps quite a bit.
Still... even with all that left unanswered its pretty cool and I would have fun playing with it even if it wasn't all that applicable to what I do every day.
I think it could be very useful in production. In fact the Jurassic Park movies were animated with mannequins. Even Pixar did research into it.
http://graphics.pixar.com/library/DinoInputDevice/
As I say, I'd love to have one. and yes, i'd love to have a cintiq as well. Never used one so I dont know if i'd prefer it over a normal tablet anyway. But at the price, i'll stick to a tablet and software posing coz this thing will be pricey as well I expect.
btw, rich. I always have difficulty getting figures at this scale to stand up without support, I doubt this will be any different. The center of balance will incorrect as well. The feet dont seem to be very stable looking and you'll notice alot of the poses in the video are sitting down or have 3 points of contact.
Anyhoo,
Heart: Yes, i'd like one.
Head: No, I don't need one...
I'm not an animator, don't really care about how useful this mannequian actually..
However!! this is still a badass looking mechanical shit with better articulation than a figma.
I can see myself paying $100 for this
would be the best way to know if your poses were balanced :P
Until then, cool statue.
Would be insanely useful for quick, natural keyframes though.
I can't conceive of this being easier or faster than posing on a rig. Hell, I find it's easier to explore poses on a rig than sketching. Once you place a foot where you want it, you can wiggle the arm around all day long and that foot's not going to move anywhere...figure's not going to fall over if the center of mass is off...not going to be struggling with articulation or joint limits.
Meh. It's kinda neat, in theory...but I guarantee the price tag will not be worth it.
I do really like the design of the little guy though.
That's different. They had teams of stop-motion animators with years of experience in that craft who had little to no experience manipulating a virtual rig on a computer. It was a bridge to get those guys' skills into 3D animation.
I'd be shocked if any of them still use the waldos. We've come a long way in terms of interactive rigs, real-time IK solvers, and various tools that make posing with a mouse super-easy.
Least you naysayers forget. Wallace and Gromit and the Muppets.
*They have a special tool for puppet actors to translate their motions unto online puppets realtime.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN8WbHomQJg
Given, they use if for facial animation, but since Im more interested in that as it is..
The planet of people who've been doing 3D animation for over a decade?
Is Posestudio free ? Or cheap ? Anyone knows where to find a demo link ? (It's all in japanese aaaah!)
and, for the sake of wading into the silly argument...
if there's enough hype and demand, better stuff will appear ('cuz I'd really like one that works both ways, and with major 3d packages). Would it do rough keyframing faster? sure? would it need to be refined to be good? yes.
is that faster than doing it all on the computer? maybe, maybe not, and since there's no one with one to test and compare, it's pure speculation.
I can see using to check if poses are balanced correctly being a neat feature, depending on the accuracy of the weights in the figure (I noticed it has a large back, with stuff on it).
I think it could also use customizable proportions (though I can also see that being much more fragile, and less likely to be first run marketable product).
Who have no other basis to go off and forgotten their mock GI Joe battles as kids.
No ones is saying it will replace it. It certainly could help enhance it.
Kinect shows that rough results can be done on a full scale body so I am sure that something similar could be used on stopmotion skeletons.
BTW, it says USB on the screenshot ... but where is the USB cable ? Does it use a wireless dongle ?
it apparently gets power through usb so i think it's safe to say that it's wired. it also comes with an sdk, but other than that i guess it relies on software devs to support it.
no one escapes rape in japan i guess.
edit: found that video with english subtitles. the site was kind of slow though so i uploaded it to my site: http://makeartbutton.com/QUMA_HD_English.mp4 URL="http://dnobori.cs.tsukuba.ac.jp/folder/quma/2011_07_21%20HD%20Video%20-%20QUMA%20Technology%20and%20Product%20-%20English/QUMA_HD_English.mp4"]source[/URL
pior: posestudio is free, but only if you have a premium membership on celsys community site. it's not really an animation tool (and relies heavily on interacting with their online pose/model library), but if you still want to check it out i can send the demo version your way.
those are quate a usable source for doing such manequins
one just needs to tape onse some radial poties at the right place
maybe we could do our own version of this, (would be cool excuse to collaborate with the hackaday community thou, modeling parts and them printing them and develop sdk
*throws Arduino in order to Hurt somebody"
Puppetry is a very different thing than a poseable USB mannequin. Putting aside any consideration about the amount of time and practice it takes to become proffecient at doing a performance through puppetry, puppetry used in this manner is more a type of motion capture than a mere tool for posing a character. Puppeteers don't manipulate little mannequins. They use their hands or their bodies as the instrument, and the technology is there to capture that performance and translate it into a virtual 3D environment.
Could that type of puppetry capture rig be used to rapidly pose a character for animation. Probably...but in pretty much the same way that putting on a mocap suit or hacking a Kinect would.
You just made me shudder at the thought of a producer 'collaborating' with an animator through a USB action figure.
"No no...move the arm up here. Ya! That's much cooler! PEW-PEW! Why are we paying you guys so much? Animatin' is easy!"
It's been renamed Qumarion (probably a contraction of 'Kuma marionette').
It's going to be priced at 67 800 yen (about 680 euro) and Celsys will start taking preorders july 21st. Apparently no info on a release date.
You get 3 pieces of included software; Clip Studio Paint Pro (Currently known as Clip Paint Lab, but will be rebranded when beta ends. A drawing app), Clip Studio Action (This tool hasn't even been announced yet so all I know is that it's a tool for "creating motion data for 3d characters". Animation software?), Clip Studio Coordinate (No info on this either, but i get the impression it's a tool for rigging/configuring your model to work with the Qumarion).
Still no word on how easily it will integrate in other 3d software like motionbuilder/maya/etc, which is sort of key. Maya/Max plugins are supposedly in the works though.
All information is taken from this page.