It is, in the words of the charming young shill in their video, “sick”:
Basically it comes with a humanoid mannequin on a stand. The mannequin is covered with fiducial marks, which the bundled software uses to pose a 3D model in the same way as the mannequin. Their software then lets you string these poses together to make an animation.
I’m thinking this would be a fantastic tool to build humanoid poses/animations for use with Unity. But my googling hasn’t turn up anyone who has yet worked out how to do this. Apparently it saves animations in some proprietary format with a “.rna” extension.
So, to use this as a serious animation tool, one would need to either reverse-engineer this .rna format, or rewrite the software to recognize the pose of the mannequin (perhaps using OpenCV).
Perhaps your google-fu is stronger than mine. Is anybody working on this already?
This is the problem with many of these name branded toys. They seem like they would be very useful, but the creators don’t actually want them used as a serious tool for developers (who knows why…) and give them their own unique file types as to make such a thing impossible. Many crayola products in particular have this problem. Most of their painting software (which is pretty basic anyway) doesn’t even export to png or jpg.
Sigh, good luck with this. It looks like the animations possible are pretty simple, but the interface is nicely accessible to people new to animation. If you are willing to delve a bit deeper, I would recommend blender. It’s free and open source, so you don’t have to worry about any licencing (which you may or may not with the crayola thing). You need to make all the 3D models you want to animate, which can be time consuming and difficult. A tool for making this easier in the case of human models is another free and open source tool called MakeHuman. To be honest, I don’t have much experience with this tool, but it looks promising.
True. But somebody could, in principle, ignore their software altogether and just visually process a camera feed using OpenCV (or similar).
Haha, no thank you, I enjoy my sanity. I already have 3D modeling/animation tools I use and enjoy. I’m just surprised that apparently nobody is yet working on a way to pose models with this clever mannequin.
Ah, I see what you are saying. Perhaps instead of using the crayola model, which appears to have few joints, you could purchase one of those standard painter ones, and paint a colored dot on each point. Since you were thinking of bypassing the software anyway, doesn’t seem like the crayola thing adds much to the picture except the idea.
Well, I think you need a unique fiducial marker on each body part, with enough detail that the imaging system can estimate the orientation thereof. A simple dot wouldn’t do it. And anything I might paint on my own mannequin would be usable only by me — the point is to come up with a system that any Unity user can use, if they invest $20 in the proper model. It’d be an awful lot of work for a one-off project, but maybe not too much if lots of people can use it.
Besides, the Crayola model looks to me to have just as many joints as the standard wooden human model… what do you see as lacking?
I already have 3D modeling/animation tools I use and enjoy. I’m just surprised that apparently nobody is yet working on a way to pose models with this clever mannequin.