Digital Puppetry Possibilities

Last quarter I did a research paper on making 3D animation more intuitive. One of the ideas I represented was related to 3D input devices replacing mouse with more efficient device(s). While researching I had found a project which was about creating a 3D mouse from traditional mouse mechanism. Here is the link to it. Neil Fraser: Hardware 3D mouse. I found this inspiring. It led me thinking into digital puppet moving which will move the character in the 3D software. Though that idea is exciting it has its own challenges. And I think there has been a lot of work done on this (esp I think ILM has used similar system on movie like Jurassic park). And motion capture can be considered a kind of digital puppetry. However what I am thinking is to make 3D animating process easier while still keeping it hand made and not automated. So the idea is to have a physical puppet which is linked to main rigging controls of the character so that the posing process becomes faster and importantly intuitive.

I was reading Keith Lango's blog where I found this article aobut Machin-X blog. I visited that blog and I was amazed at the work that was shown there. It's again inspiring to do something about physical input system to make 3D animation more intuitive. However the biggest challenge would be to make it affordable to every desktop animator.

Here is Machine-X blog.