One way to turn a head

Here's a head capture rig I designed and assembled tonight to test the new head tracking system in iPi Mocap Studio.

It came together nicely--the velcro straps fit into the slots in the bicycle helmet and I cut a hole in the foam pad to keep the PS Move's trigger from being pressed--but I'm not sure I can recommend this rig because:

1. To keep the helmet firmly fixed to the head I need to tighten the strap under the neck, which isn't very comfortable for me. I'd much rather have a helmet with an actual chin strap.

2. A bike helmet is too expensive for this purpose and I want to keep using this one as a bike helmet.

This rig will get me started for testing anyway. I'm getting a cheap skateboard helmet in a couple of days but I'm still looking for other options for attaching this thing to my head.

And here are some more sandwiches.
 

Walrus!

Crabby!

Jelly!

Sienna!

- G.

Sneak Peek: Brudders CGI

Here's a peek at what Sergeant, Toullie and Sister look like rendered in 3D.


These images are from a test of the new Skin material introduced in Lightwave 10.1. (See, we are working on the movie!)

And this is what a rigged character looks like inside the 3D program running on my tablet PC.


As you can see here, Lightwave 10.1's new realtime previewer, called VPR, is pretty sweet.

Okay, so if these were actual toys, would you buy one? Let us know; we're thinking about making that happen after the movie is finished.

Finally here's a small sample of the mocap 'puppetry' created for Sergeant last fall using iPi Desktop Motion Capture:



This video may look a little 'jumpy' because the animation was played back live and I'm sure frames were being dropped for realtime speed. Next time I'll post animation of all the Brudders characters pre-cached for full speed playback.

G.