If you haven’t heard of Animata, take a look at it now. Its amazing animation software that you can control with your body. Back in 2009 we threw a party where guests could control a projected, animated musician by moving their arms and body. I corresponded with Bence, the Animata developer to get this working on Windows, and had meant to do a full write up. Here we are nearly two years later. I’ll do my best to reconstruct the steps as the effect is still very cool.
- Download Animata
- Download Eyesweb 4.0.0.10
- Download Bence’s script
- Hook up your camera
- Follow Bence’s advice: eyesweb sends the positions of the skeleton in variable sizes, eg. if you get closer to the camera the skeleton will grow, and that’s what animata cannot handle. The program I wrote maintains the size of your skeleton. Now it is working quite well: http://www.binaura.net/bnc/temp/ShadowTheatreEngine.zip. After you have to opened all 3 applications, create 12 Joints in Animata named body0joint0, body0joint1 … body0joint11 (this is very important!) after this, you will see that everything is moving, which is very good, so you are almost there….This program receives the data from eyesweb and forwards the right data to animata. Also you have to adjust your skeleton size, the length of the arms etc. to fit your character in animata, that is what you can do in EDIT mode.
- At this point you should be able to achieve something like my screencast below:
- The problem I describe in the screencast was resolved with the following reply from Bence: Your problem is in eyesweb is the camera resolution, you can change if you click on the camera icon, and you can change it in the parameter window. Try to set it 320×240 if you are using webcam the engine communicates width animata through OSC messages: you should set the OSC object in eyesweb like this: host_name : 127.0.0.1, port: 12000, OSC_command: /body eyesweb to shadow-engine communicates on port 12000, engine to animata on port: 7110…