WORKSHOP: Intro to Motion Capture

Motion capture was exclusively a high-end production tool until 2010, when the Kinect suddenly became the first mocap system ever sold at Best Buy. In the hands of experimental animators, live performance data can be used to explore lots of options beyond traditional character animation, anything from pure visual music to realtime puppetry. In this workshop, we’ll demonstrate the setup and use of a typical Kinect-based capture system, using iPi Studio and Blender–but we can explore other options depending on student interest, for example Unity or Maya. It’ll be important to have some prior animation experience, but you won’t need to already know anything about 3D CG specifically to start doing cool stuff with mocap.