Hello all
I've been trying a few things with moho and it looks really cool .. Now one thing I would like to know is if there is plans to create a kind of motion capture tool that would be able to export its recordings as bones movments in moho ?
Motion capture acquired from simple webcams for example.
If not I would like to see such a tool and maybe i could contribute some code (i'm more an programmer then a artwork guy) if i can access to the doc of the moho file format (i've noticed it's simple text files).
Thanks
Eriam
Motion capture
Moderators: Víctor Paredes, Belgarath, slowtiger
A few of us have discussed the possibilities. Myself, I've been wondering about it for some time (well before Moho 5 came out). There are a few scattered threads, maybe do a search under motion capture.
There aren't really any docs specifically on the .moho file format, although I've found most of it isn't all that hard to figure out. But that's not really all that necessary. The Lua interface gives you easy access to pretty much anything you'd like to change in Moho. I've written stuff to import and export Moho camera data. My biggest problem (I'm a bit of the opposite, I'm not as strong in the programming department) was that most motion capture formats are 3D, and I've been avoiding making an importer because all those transformations to make it usable in Moho make my head spin. But if you think you can write something that will output something (make up a file format, as long as it's plaintext) that can be interpreted by Moho, getting the info in is not a problem.
It seems some sort of standardized skeleton structure is needed to assign the data to. No problem. But because Moho is 2d, the relationships between joints has to be dealt with by using a combination of bone rotation and bone scaling. If the file format could give angles for each joint down the IK chain based on the main parent bone, and relative bone length between joints, we can get that into moho easy. I'm getting pretty comfortable with Lua and it's API into Moho, so if you want to write something to output motion data, I'll write an importer in a second. It would be a pleasure.
There aren't really any docs specifically on the .moho file format, although I've found most of it isn't all that hard to figure out. But that's not really all that necessary. The Lua interface gives you easy access to pretty much anything you'd like to change in Moho. I've written stuff to import and export Moho camera data. My biggest problem (I'm a bit of the opposite, I'm not as strong in the programming department) was that most motion capture formats are 3D, and I've been avoiding making an importer because all those transformations to make it usable in Moho make my head spin. But if you think you can write something that will output something (make up a file format, as long as it's plaintext) that can be interpreted by Moho, getting the info in is not a problem.
It seems some sort of standardized skeleton structure is needed to assign the data to. No problem. But because Moho is 2d, the relationships between joints has to be dealt with by using a combination of bone rotation and bone scaling. If the file format could give angles for each joint down the IK chain based on the main parent bone, and relative bone length between joints, we can get that into moho easy. I'm getting pretty comfortable with Lua and it's API into Moho, so if you want to write something to output motion data, I'll write an importer in a second. It would be a pleasure.
it would be very cool if there were a motion capture tool, but i'm not sure whether it would work in this type of app. Motion capture is more of 3D thing.
If you use a web cam, won't the quality of the web cam make it harder for the program to capture the motion? webcams frame rates aren't exactly the greatest either. Also how will the motion capture tool know what is the arm and head etc? and how will it export to bones into moho? also what would happen if the character was a totally different shape the motion captured object?
Some questions to think about really.
If you use a web cam, won't the quality of the web cam make it harder for the program to capture the motion? webcams frame rates aren't exactly the greatest either. Also how will the motion capture tool know what is the arm and head etc? and how will it export to bones into moho? also what would happen if the character was a totally different shape the motion captured object?
Some questions to think about really.
--Scott
cribble.net
cribble.net
I was thinking about this too, but I think that there are uses that would benefit 2D animation. Of course, you must have different moho setups (one for profile, one for straight-on, one for 3/4, etc). But taking the 3D data and then projecting it into a 2D plane for one of those setups should be fairly easy (not trivial, but doable. I remember doing that in school in computer graphics courses).cribble wrote:it would be very cool if there were a motion capture tool, but i'm not sure whether it would work in this type of app. Motion capture is more of 3D thing.
I guess I just don´t get the motion capture for Moho thing.
Can anyone give me an example of when and why one would want to do it?
Moho is for making 2D animated cartoons or isn´t it?
For all the time and money and effort it would take to set up a motion capture of me eating a piece of cake, I think I could figure out how to move the bones of the character around and it would probably be accomplished a lot faster and cheaper.
I hope someone can clue me in on why my dumb thinking is wrong.
Can someone please post an animation they have done that would be better and faster completed by using motion capture. Thanks!
Can anyone give me an example of when and why one would want to do it?
Moho is for making 2D animated cartoons or isn´t it?
For all the time and money and effort it would take to set up a motion capture of me eating a piece of cake, I think I could figure out how to move the bones of the character around and it would probably be accomplished a lot faster and cheaper.
I hope someone can clue me in on why my dumb thinking is wrong.
Can someone please post an animation they have done that would be better and faster completed by using motion capture. Thanks!
Yeah, you're right. It does go off the subject, of MoHo being a 2D app, putting in this feature that some of us may never use... even though we thought it could be useful.... thinking about has made me think, "how would i use this?" and more generally "whats the point?"Toontoonz wrote:Can anyone give me an example of when and why one would want to do it?
Moho is for making 2D animated cartoons or isn´t it?
--Scott
cribble.net
cribble.net
It could be a "poor man's" roto tool. Imagine being able to use track data to constrain joint position to. Could be a cool effect. The real technical and monetary question being, where do you get the track data from and how do you use it, most packages that offer tracking aren't cheap (unless you want to do it by hand). After that it should be relatively simple to manipulate that information into joint constraints (and I stress relatively, as it's beyond my programming abilities, but is probably pretty basic math of joint positions).
As I understand moho, since bones in Moho only work in 2d space (or 2d plane more specifically), you'd most likely be limited to profile motion capture and not true 3d motion capture. Which for some would be fine and dandy.
If you think doing it by hand is the way to go, then there's no real reason you can't do it now (if only being a little tedious).
Personally, I'd rather do it by hand and have Lost Marble continue to focus on improving Moho along those lines, but that' just my 2 cents.
As I understand moho, since bones in Moho only work in 2d space (or 2d plane more specifically), you'd most likely be limited to profile motion capture and not true 3d motion capture. Which for some would be fine and dandy.
If you think doing it by hand is the way to go, then there's no real reason you can't do it now (if only being a little tedious).
Personally, I'd rather do it by hand and have Lost Marble continue to focus on improving Moho along those lines, but that' just my 2 cents.
Last edited by kdiddy13 on Mon Mar 07, 2011 5:08 am, edited 1 time in total.
Maybe it would be cool if you could import a movie of the mocap animation and then 'pin' your moho bones to a matching poisition in the movie layer. ie. pin the moho knee to the movie knee. Even if you were limited to profile views it could be handy. In fact if you could pin knee and ankle then you could also at least resize the bone which should be easier than handling all those 3D to 2D translation conversions.
What I looking at right now is tryng to make an importer for .BVH motion capture files. Set a viewing angle, and then convert the 3D info in the file to bone rotation and scaling. I tend to use bone scaling a fair amount in animations to simulate 3D movements (like, say, scaling down a forarm bone to make it look like the forearm is moving towards or away from the camera). If you don't get too extreme it works pretty well. So I figure if you use motion capture data that doesn't mave any movement in it that Moho normally couldn't do, you should be okay. There's a fair amount of free stuff out there, I just got a few test files from StockMoves, lot of good basic motion capture data. Lots of different styles of walks, runs, etc. As soon as I work out the transformations I'll put up a sample. Lord knows how long that'll take, though.
Good luck 7feet. I think it's probably a pretty worthwhile adventure, even if I don't necessarily have a use for it now, it doesn't mean that I won't later or that others won't have tremendous use of it. If it works out, I imagine it could have a pretty unique and interesting look to it.
Last edited by kdiddy13 on Mon Mar 07, 2011 5:08 am, edited 1 time in total.
jorgy - Sure, some help would be welcome. I need to set the point of view and then convert the 3D rotation to 2D. That would just be for getting the orientation of the root bone. I figured if the initial rotation was expressed as a vector, after it was projected I could use the angle and use the differences in length of the vector to determine the bone scaling. From there, off the top of my head, I'd just need run a transform from the previous bones angle on the current one, and do the same projection. So that's really the one thing I need. I was looking at some stuff on basic rendering techniques that looked likely, but it's making my eyes cross.
Other than that, just parsing the file and applying the info is relatively easy.
Other than that, just parsing the file and applying the info is relatively easy.
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LittleFenris
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It seems in Mohos case that simply rotoscoping a quicktime or mpeg movie would be the most useful thing for users. Instead of having just a "tracing image" have the option to import a movie file in the background to "trace". This would be great for people just learning how to animate. Once they've rotoscoped some walk cycles and other movements they will understand the way the body moves better, then will be able to do the animations w/o rotoscoping.
If you all want to get fancy, make a tool that has a start and end point for each bone they want to rotoscope that they could move around to trace the movement of the underlying video (say the start point is the shoulder socket of the person/animal in the reference video and the end point is the elbow). It would be like adding those little white balls you see in motion capture, but after the fact, and in a 2D space. If you don't get what I mean, I could mockup something as a picture so you see what I mean.
If you all want to get fancy, make a tool that has a start and end point for each bone they want to rotoscope that they could move around to trace the movement of the underlying video (say the start point is the shoulder socket of the person/animal in the reference video and the end point is the elbow). It would be like adding those little white balls you see in motion capture, but after the fact, and in a 2D space. If you don't get what I mean, I could mockup something as a picture so you see what I mean.
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Lost Marble
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Just import a movie file as an Image layer in Moho. It won't have that "faded" look that tracing images have, but it should work just fine. (If you really want it faded, just draw a semi-transparent white rectangle on top of it, and make sure Transparency is enabled in the Display Quality options.)LittleFenris wrote:Instead of having just a "tracing image" have the option to import a movie file in the background to "trace".
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LittleFenris
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Thanks for the tip.Lost Marble wrote:Just import a movie file as an Image layer in Moho. It won't have that "faded" look that tracing images have, but it should work just fine. (If you really want it faded, just draw a semi-transparent white rectangle on top of it, and make sure Transparency is enabled in the Display Quality options.)