(Non-Blender:) QUMA is an awesome gadget that allows you to pose your characters with a 3D motion caption figure. Very cool.
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About the Author
Bart Veldhuizen
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.
23 Comments
There's no official website given and no mention of price either. As intriguing as it was I would hardly call it news, more of an advert without any real substance. Does this have a plugin for blender??
first!
wow! the technology rocks, this is much easier to pose
here's their website
http://www.softether.co.jp/en/
@jigglees100: I did find an 'official' website at http://quma.jp/en/quma/ It is still under development it seems.
@geert: link added, thanks!
@jigglees100: did you even read the words 'Non Blender'? What do you think they mean?
Look awesome!! I dread to think of the cost!
すごい！！
Where from are these cool things popping up lately?!
Another must have!
Funny thing, I submitted an article here on blendernation 2 days ago about QUMA with video and links (a full post using submit news http://www.blendernation.com/submit-news/ ). The submitted article were never published, and I didn't received any feedback. Bad behavior :(
This is pretty cool. They did something like this for Jurassic Park because the animators had stop-motion backgrounds.
@epima: sorry about that! Sometimes we get the same news from multiple angles and I miss stuff that's in our mailbox. Still, thanks for the pointer.
Nice device ! I hope it will be usable with Blender and affordable in the future...
Geez-
I'm not a big lover of character animation, but this would be a blast to use. It's like combining my love of 3d and all those years I played with action figures. Awesome!
How much would YOU pay for this?
Wow. That is really cool. It would be neat to see something like that usable for Blender.
I only see a big con with this thingy.
You can't do excessively non canonical human figures (think "heavy" from Team Fortress 2, or even a dwarf or other cartoony characters....)
They could also make the motion sensor wearable by a human actor for motion capture methink.
Interesting concept but lacks flexibility as it is for now...
@aws357
Now that is an idea. I'm not sure how interconnected the wires are within the real world model they have, but I bet they could sell multiple kinds of models or send it in pieces so you can build the model as you need... maybe. I think though, most things can probably be used with the standard model they have. From "heavy" to a dwarf to cartoony characters, the basic rig in your 3D models are generally the same in standard humanoid form. It's when you get to spiders or vehicles, transforming robots, that the basic model isn't going to be very useful.
Hey, if we can get Kinect working with Blender, why not this?
Can't you just paint some colored dots in a mannequin figurine, capture live with a webcam, use camera tracking and pose automatically in Blender?
If not, it should be made a plugin, cause I think it could be done.
What a great tool! Heck, if they can do that, why not make angle measuring devices that someone can strap onto legs, arms, knees and so forth, then create a mocap from that? All you'd need then is a way to move the character around in 3d space so it wouldn't look like it was dancing or walking in place, not that hard, considering that at least one foot is generally always planted on the ground.
Rad.
My message to the developers - shut up and take my money! :-) I would gladly pay $100-$200 for this if it worked with Blender, and would probably (not-so-gladly) pay more.
What a novel and interesting idea. I'd love to try out animating a sequence with it. Obviously you'd only block out animations with it but its still very interesting.
The video looks very good. I made some observations about this in my blog. Hope you don't mind to take a look or sharing it here with you. I don't want to minimize the experiment, it is a very good tool. I just want to know more about it, and if somebody has more informations or experience about it, it will be well received.
http://con100.blogspot.com/2011/07/quma-motion-capture-robot.html
How did I miss this one two days ago?! This is nice! It's a nice option for motion capture. I would imagine that we'd still need manual animation for clean-ups and full-body motion capture for capturing smooth actions like running, but this is a nice option to use for posing! I'd imagine that there'd be no problem getting it to work in Blender, seeing that it's just a input method and we've already got alternative input methods like 3D mouse to work with Blender. I'd love to pick up one of these. Nice post!