Face, body, hands, knees and boomps-a-daisies!

As part of Centroid's ongoing mission to boldly go where no one has gone before, we spent a day in the studio testing camera setups with a combined face, hands and body shoot. It's not exactly punching a Klingon in the face, but sometimes you have to make you're own entertainment!

Utilising the thespian powers of resident performer Brian Herring, we shot numerous takes pushing the system and set-up as far as we could. There's a joke in there along the lines of 'she can't take no more capt'n', but the Star Trek thing has gone a bit far now.

The results have proved a great success with clients, and have led to other R&D projects, including controlling face and hand blendshapes with live marker data. Engage!

They never come off you know...

And you're back in the room...

It's a puppet!

Towards the end of 2008, Mr. Brian Herring joined Centroid for three months as our resident performer. In that time, as well as shooting large amounts of library data, we also dabbled with various different R&D tests (firing a cat into space was our most spectacular failure).

Being ex-Henson's, and also having a closet fetish for putting his forearm up things, Brian brought in one of his puppets and we began experimenting with live performance capture. Check it out!

Neville the puppet.

Strange insertion...

Creature feature!

When Brian said he could do something amazing with crutches and a pair of Poweriser stilts, the first thought was to involve the authorities. However, when it became apparent that what he really meant was to put his extensive experience in creature performance to use, we unlocked the door and let him in.

The results were great, and really expand the potential for motion capture to be used to drive weird and wonderful creatures! And what a great excuse to bound around in Poweriser stilts all day!