Panda Puppet migrating to Blender

A screenshot of Blender in action.

Just a quick update for those who have expressed interest in the Panda Puppet digital puppetry application (see previous post)...after some careful consideration I've decided to migrate the project away from Panda 3d to the Blender Game Engine instead. I've been very impressed with the latest version of Blender and I'll be using a Blender-based pipeline for a couple of projects I have coming up so it only made sense to make the switch. Blender also enjoys a much wider user and developer base (numbering about 250,000 people I believe) so that's a nice added benefit as well.

I'm probably still a few months away from assembling a decent working Panda Puppet script, but when I do you'll see it here.

ILM, LucasArts & Machinima

George Lucas is the most influential filmmaker of the past thirty years. Not just because of Star Wars and Industrial Light and Magic either; he's lit and/or bankrolled the spark behind virtually every major advance in digital cinema since the dawn of the computer age. A new BusinessWeek article discusses how now George has got religion when it comes to Machinima and is restructuring his LucasArts and ILM divisions in an effort to have the two separate companies work together collaboratively in the area of real-time 3d graphics and previsualization.

You just know that some cool technology is going to come out of this!

Gorillaz live @ the Grammys

Madonna shares the stage with the Gorillaz at the 2006 Grammy Awards.

Over at PuppetVision last Novemember, I featured a video of the animated "virtual band" Gorillaz performing live at the MTV Music Awards in Europe. Well, they've gone and taken this to the next level. Check out Gorillaz performing with Madonna live at the Grammy Awards last week. Especially cool is the part where Madonna walks behind Murdoc.

ILM is reportedly developing technology for a Gorillaz world tour in 2007. How much do you want to bet they'll be throwing some kind of digital puppetry technique in to the mix to allow for some wickedly-cool audience interaction? If they're not, they should be. In fact, as great as ILM is, if you ask me the Jim Henson Creature Shop should be all over this.

Link via Gorillaz-Unofficial.com.

Hugh Hancock resigns from Machinima.com

The big news today in the Machinima world is that Hugh Hancock has resigned as Editor-in-Chief of Machinima.com. Hugh was one of the earliest and most enthusiastic proponents of the artform, co-founding Machinima.com and doing pioneering work through Strange Company. In an open letter to the Machinima community (see link above) Hugh explains he's stepping aside to focus on his work with Strange Company and because he feels that after six years he's getting stale and needs new challenges.

Best of luck to Hugh with all his future endeavours - he's owed a tremendous 'thank you' for all his hard work by Machinima filmmakers and fans everywhere.

Muglets

Muglets.com allows you to create customized Flash-based digital puppets and avatars.

Muglets are cool little Flash-based digital puppets you can customize by uploading a photo of you, your family or your friends. Once you've created a Muglet it can emailed as an e-card. New styles are uploaded weekly. The site is really only good for it's novelty value, but what it does do it does very well.

Glossing over "The Movies"

Tony Walsh has written a thoughtful response to Annalee Newitz's recent Wired article about The Movies in his Clickable Culture blog. While I think the The Movies is an interesting step forward for Machinima, it's not the killer app Machinima filmmakers want and, as Tony points out, potential censorship by the game's makers is a big part of the reason why.

Digital Puppetry Hardware, part 3: The P5 Glove

The P5 Glove by Alliance Distributors offers fantastic potential for digital puppetry at a low, low price.

In my last post I wrote about the Nintendo Power Glove, the legendary but not-quite-so-revolutionary controller for the NES. Assuming that some kind of similar and relatively affordable dataglove would be a necessary part of any widely accessible digital puppetry system, I set out about a month ago to locate one and found the P5 Glove, a cheap (usually $65 or less retail) computer peripheral that uses bend sensors and remote tracking to allow users to intuitively interact with 3D and virtual environments.

I haven't actually gotten my hands on one of these yet, but the consensus from the online reviews that I've read is that the P5 is a very good product, especially for it's price range. In fact, it's probably the best glove ever designed at such a low price point. Its only drawbacks are that (like the Nintendo Power Glove before it) the P5's motion tracking is line-of-sight and there are indications that its bend sensors may be somewhat limited. I think the biggest problem with the P5 may be that the lack of games or applications available for it has meant it's gotten a lukewarm reception in the marketplace so far. This makes me doubt that future generations of the product will be produced and it could be discontinued altogether.

But problems aside, the P5 has a lot of potential. A strong developer community has sprung up around it and it's been hacked for use in everything from music to robotics. For those of you who are technically inclined, here's some interesting links for developing applications for the P5:

• Disassembling the P5 - an article that "looks inside" the P5 and its tower
• P5 Specs - From manufacturer Alliance Distributors (formerly Essential Reality)
• P5 SDKs - P5 Glove software development kits for Windows and Linux

There are already a number of open source MIDI drivers available for the P5 and since a lot of animatronics boards are MIDI-controlled I couldn't help thinking that it would be cool to try using a P5 to control an animatronic puppet, much like Perform FX does with their proprietary glove.

But even if the P5 Glove is a nice consumer-grade control device for digital puppetry, there's still a need for a better, high-performance solution for professional applications.

The results of the search for that will be the subject of my next post...