Gadzooks Studio Shows Why Performance Beats Prompting

Gadzooks Studio, a Manchester-based stop motion animation studio founded by animation directors Steve Boot and Haydn Secker, has been sharing some really delightful digital puppetry experiments on Instagram. They’re building a Blender-based pipeline that utilizes TouchDesigner, which lets artists and technologists build interactive animation systems without writing traditional code.

What they've shared so far is pretty impressive:

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What Gadzooks is doing here is using TouchDesigner to feed their live performance in to Blender, which acts as the character/animation environment. This allows them to create digital puppets that respond to a performer in real time: facial expressions, head turns, timing, reactions, and little bits of character business.

TouchDesigner, created by Toronto-based Derivative, is a big part of Gadzooks’ not-so-secret sauce (although, to their credit, they’ve been sharing much of their workflow on Instagram). TouchDesigner is able to take a variety of live inputs - everything from camera footage to audio, MIDI, sensors, controllers, or just about anything else that outputs a signal - and use that input to control a character in real time without traditional hand-keyed animation. It’s a more sophisticated version of what I was trying to build with Panda Puppet many years ago - a way to make it possible to use almost anything to perform a digital character.

It’s a really great example of the advantage digital performance has over AI-based prompting: the immediacy of puppetry, with the flexibility and control of a digital animation pipeline. The best of both worlds.

I'm excited to see what others might be able to do with TouchDesigner, as well as what else Gadzooks is working on. To keep up-to-date with them, follow Gadzooks.Studio on Instagram!

Inside the Digital Puppetry of Jim Henson’s Puppet Up!

The Henson Digital Puppetry Studio is a digital puppetry platform the Jim Henson Company has been building for decades, with roots that go back to Waldo C. Graphic in the late 1980s. The technology has come a long way since then, and in recent years has become good enough that the Jim Henson Company regularly uses it in Puppet Up!, their touring live improvised puppet comedy show.

In this video from Tested, Henson puppeteers Sarah Oh and Dan Garza show host Adam Savage how they use their puppeteering and improv skills to blend a digital character seamlessly - and hilariously - with a group of practical puppets in a single performance before a live audience. 

What makes this so impressive, of course, isn’t just the technology. It’s that Oh and Garza are skilled puppeteers doing what skilled puppeteers have always done: listening, reacting, finding the joke, and creating the illusion of life where it doesn't actually exist at all.

The octopus may be digital, but the performance is remarkable because it's unmistakably human.

If you want to see the Henson Digital Puppetry Studio in action yourself, Puppet Up! will be playing the Montalbán Theatre in Los Angeles this summer. Visit PuppetUp.com for upcoming tour dates and full details.

Digital Wayang Kulit

Here's a nine minute demo of a Digital Wayang Kulit (Indonesian shadow puppetry) program developed at the MSc in Digital Education program at University of Edinburgh. The 2D figure is controlled by the digital Dalang (puppeteer) using a Gametrak controller and a Wiimote.

There have been a lot of shadow puppet inspired digital puppetry demos created over the years (this one is from 2013), but I love how fluid the movement of this one is.

Special thanks to Jane for submitting this!

Character Animator - A 2D Real-Time Animation tool from Adobe

Adobe has just unveiled a new 2D digital puppetry - or have we all agreed to call this field real-time animation now? - application called Character Animator. A demo of the software is provided in the video above, but essentially it's a tool for animating 2D bitmap (Photoshop) and vector (Illustrator) still characters in real-time using a camera, microphone, head tracking and facial mo-cap.

In addition to basic mo-cap and lip sync capabilities, it also allows users to create programmable behaviors and will support the creation of 3rd party plug ins. I haven't tried it myself yet, but it looks like it could be a very easy-to-use and potentially powerful tool for creating basic 2D animated characters in real-time.

Adobe Character Animator is currently in beta and available for testing by After Effects CC users. You can learn more here.

Via The Labyrinth.

Unbelievably impressive demo of the Unreal Engine 4

It's been far, far too long since I posted an update here on Machin-X, but I may be (finally) returning to some digital puppetry work in the near future and when I saw this demo for the Unreal Engine 4 I had to share it.

It is, well, pretty unreal:

The Kite open world demo created in Unreal Engine 4 features a diverse and beautifully realized 100 square mile landscape. Everything is generated completely in real-time at 30fps and includes fully dynamic direct and indirect illumination, cinematic depth of field and motion blur, and procedurally placed trees and foliage.

Real-time 3D sure has come a long way since I first worked on a TV pilot for a proposed kids' series using cardboard cut-outs and blob tracking with a webcam to create some 2D flash animation almost a decade ago.

I wonder where this technology will go in the ten years or so?

Henson Digital Puppetry Studio

This is a brand new promotional reel for the Henson Digital Puppetry Studio, the patented real-time animation/digital puppetry system developed by Jim Henson's Creature Shop.

This is a simple, but nonetheless very effective example of 2D digital puppetry created using Unity and a Kinect.