HOLY HELL…I’ve needed this thing for like forever. Forget hunting open source mocap data, I would just do run and walk cycles on my desk with a doll!
hahah I want one of those!!!
The monkey has been around forever:
“Forever” seems like a fitting term. The PDF on the site still has the “Alias Wavefront” Logo on the center of the 2nd page.
Don’t you already do that with your real-life sex doll?
Joke aside, this is a tedious process, mocap is faster and more natural.
This looks pretty cool, and would be a cool desktop toy to have 
However, how do you make it so the animations don’t look like someone moving a doll around, and more natural like Mocap?
Having operated a four-body 30 camera mocap lab, I can say that mocap is superior but it’s not less tedious by any means. Not everyone has facilities or money to support it, either. I’d still like a Monkey for quick at-the-desk adjustments.
This modern take on the Monkey was on Engadget over a year ago:
I think it’s basically vaporware, or at least they can’t offer it outside of Japan for some other reason (patents? localization? support?).
While this is certainly great for “posing” I don’t think it would work very well for natural animations. It probably will be easier and faster to create hand crafted key frame animations with this tool, but I don’t think it can match the other MoCap solutions out there.
[EDIT] Sorry for repeating what has been said already, did not see the latest comments…
I’d love to see a good discussion on indie solutions for mocap and animation in general.
Based on the blogs and articles I have read it seems like there are a couple fairly easy options such as:
- ipiSoft/ - This is one that gets the best reviews from what I can tell, using dual Kinects
- iClone 5 with mocap plugin
I like the simplicity of using a Kinect solution and it doesn’t take up much room space. I am worried about buying into something like that with Kinect 2.0 around the corner however, don’t want to get one of these then find out you have to pay upgrade fees as soon as 2.0 comes out.
At last guys will have valid excuse for playing with dolls: “I’m not playing with dolls, I’m recording Mocap data for a game!”
Well… People (including me) don’t do bad animations because it is so hard to use a program’s rotate and position tools, but because they don’t observe motions well. This doll won’t make observing motions any easier.
Also it requires 2 hands to use, it is another tool that takes place on a desk, needs to be plugged in, etc. So I don’t think this would be really useful to me.
It’s not supposed to be like mocap. Mocap isn’t the be-all and end-all of animation; for example Pixar uses no mocap.
–Eric
Ha ha wow lot’s of discussion about animation. When I posted this the way I envisioned this in my workflow wasn’t as a replacement or “mocap” rig in small form. I would use it to create my key poses for cycles and of course hand animate everything inbetween (polish key poses as well). Really the strength of this thing is the ability to pose it…which is key for animation. I use mocap, but man, once I’m done editing and doing an animation, most of it ends up being hand keyframed.
But animating has a lot to do with posing. It’s up to you to choose and put your poses together so they flow naturally!
Although I wonder if this tool would be practical, or just a fun toy.
Could be both. 
It’s practical for the same reason that modeling is still done in some cases by actually modeling an object in real life and then scanning it: you just can’t beat the real world for manipulating actual 3D objects, as opposed to doing stuff through a 2D screen (no matter how fancy your input device is).
–Eric
Now all we need is for someone to figure out how to lay out scenes in a similar way. I don’t know about anyone else, but I hate trying to making sure the position/rotation of objects line up correctly (ie: not clipping through walls etc) - snapping helps, but it’s still a tedious process sometimes.
Speaking as a professional animator - this thing would be useless. Like they admit in the video, it’s basically a toy designed to help wannabe illustrators, nothing else. It’s easier to manipulate an animation rig in your chosen package than try and fight with something like this.
-The proportions of this things won’t match your character proportions, unless you model them specifically the same. Without the proportions matching, you lose the 1:1 posing.
-What do you do when you want to go back and refine a pose? This thing doesn’t re-pose itself, so you’d be starting from scratch each time. So unless you plan on getting every pose PERFECT the first time (never happens)… you’re hosed.
-You’re basically stuck doing stop-motion with something like this… and if you’re doing stop-motion you’re losing all the charm by inputting it into a computer.
-You’d still have to create an actual animation rig anyhow - for final control (fingers, auxiliary nodes, etc). As pose-able as it is, it still can’t mimic the full range of motion of a real person let alone a stretchy bendy cartoon character.