(Luduvica) Digital Hand Puppet – expressive digital puppeteering

(Luduvica) Digital Hand Puppet – expressive digital puppeteering

Demonstration of full hand control for expressive digital puppetry

This video shows how to animate a digital puppet in real-time with just one hand in an expressive manner.
It is part of a PhD research in the digital puppetry field.

Stringless hand controller (a metaphor for the marionette controller)
Hand + 5 finger controls different aspects of the puppet

Hand: position and orientation of the puppet
Pinky finger: Eye Pupils rotation in all directions
Index finger: Eyelashes rotation in the +Y and -Y axis (open and close)
Middle finger: Right Eyebrow blend shape deformation for character expressions
Ring finger: Left Eyebrow blend shape deformation for character expressions
Thumb: Mouth (open and close) blend shape deformation

There are different degrees of freedom (DOF) for each finger mapped to a certain puppet control.
The Hand as 6 DOF (position and rotation), you can move your hand freely around the tracking area but must be carful with the occlusion problem;
The pinky finger has 3 DOF for rotation of the eye pupils, and although controlling the pinky finger independently as some constraints, for this kind of small motion is more then adequate.
The middle and ring fingers are have more constraints and it is very hard to controlled them independently, so I mapped just 1 DOF (up and down) of each finger to the eyebrows.
The index finger as more potential because you can control more degrees of freedom, I tried using the index to control the eye pupils but the results were not so great. Instead, the index finger is mapped to the eyelashes rotation with just 1 DOF (up and down)

This is a good direction for digital puppeteers that have full control of the character expressivity. It require some training to act like a character, but that´s the magic of puppeteering.

This prototype can animate two different full controlled puppets for interaction.
A powerful model for performance animation using digital puppeteering techniques.

Hardware: Leap motion device for hand tracking and a macbook
Software: Unity Engine

For more information on digital puppetry: virtualmarionette.grifu.com
+info about me: grifu.com

Oct 2014
(Luduvica) Digital Hand Puppet – expressive digital puppeteering



(Luduvica) Digital Hand Puppet – expressive digital puppeteering