itmeJP Community


itmeJP Community

Wacky animated Adam Koebel digital puppet time

Fan Creations
#1

I’ve mostly recovered from my turtle finger crushing incident… and so I decided to test out another animation program. This time its Adobe Character Animator. Basically, you sit infront of your webcam and act and it will use that to make your puppet speak and move their eyes, and blink and what have you all animated in real time similar to that 3d face rig thing, but in 2d.

I had this fever dream about… like… "what if Nebula Jazz was a live animated show… " And so this is a test of a real time puppet animation with my interpretation of cartoon Adam. Honestly I realized that there is probably no way this is feasible because it would require everyone having adobe aftereffects(if you have AE, it comes with it) and what not…

But still…

Anyways, this is obviously not me speaking… I imported some dialogue from Blade Runner and had it do auto-lip-sync… I had to do a bit of fixing and the technology is probably still not quite there… but… hey… dare to dream.

I have no idea why he keeps on winking. I assume i need better lighting on my camera. shadows confuse it.

10 Likes
#2

Imagine a :itmejproll::itmejpplay: show where everyones’ camera feed is run through one of those! Live!

4 Likes
#3

Only TheDesec gets it mannnn… Live cartoon Rollplay! Its like…the Saturday morning cartoons we all want to see as adults!

So, because I like avoiding doing actual work and would rather spend my time wasting time… and I’m a bit obsessive…

I isolated Adams webcam from a Nebula Jazz VOD and had the puppet animate itself based on his movement just to test out how a live stream would be. So the eye blinks, eye movement, eye brow, lip-sync, head movement… its all automatically done by the program interpreting his webcam(my horrible rip of it anyways) and audio in real time. There is no set up… it just recognizes eyes, eyebrows, the nose, the chin and mouth by itself.

I should have hit the “set default pose” though before recording because the Adam-puppets eyes weren’t centered at the start and so are slightly off.
Stuff like the hair dangling is just a physics based thing… the head moves and the hair is like on a spring and reacts.

Hey… maybe a One-shot… or a one hour segment of the 4 hour streams.

Should I stop? Do I require some kind of help to stave off these dreams of real time animated shows?

Fineeeeee…

Oh, this video is unlisted because I didnt feel right about uploading JP’s content publicly even to just show off this technology.

P.S. Yes I threw in a still of my earlier attempt at a Eugene over dodger, even though I did it in a different style and its no where near as good as some of the yellow-green versions I’ve seen posted here.

7 Likes
#4

Interesting. (Apparently I can’t just type that so this.)

#5

omg please let this happen… :smiley:

Imagine the GM sending the group in some parallel dimension for a bit and during that they switch from live action to animated or vice versa… so many trippy possibilities hnngggg!

I’d also like silly animated backgrounds in case they use green screens…

P.S.: Depending on how difficult this is to set up, this might also be a fun solution for camera shy people, like recently DM @MontyGlu! :itmejpcute::itmejpnation:

#6

You don’t need to use a green screen. You just film in front of your webcam and it translates that to the puppet. The puppet has whatever background you want to throw in there, you can change it as you want.

Some streamers actually already use it with out a background and just throw it over their game like you would some green screened webcam footage.

I thought the same thing about the camera shy people when I was watching The Time Cleaver. I’d be willing to set up her a puppet or help her artist figure out how to do it if she wants. It requires owning the adobe suite though in order to use it… or at least Adobe After effects(since Character Animator comes with that.)

There are a lot of camera shy streamers too.

But yeah… cmon @itmeJP … all we are saying, is give cartoons a chanceeeeee…

#7

Holy shit. THE POTENTIAL! I can taste it!

#8

OK, i just took the puppet rig out for a test. This is all performed real time infront of a webcam.

I was just saying words to show of the puppet acting… that world building tho…

Ok, I’m done with the wackiness for a while.

No harm meant @AdamKoebel !!!

4 Likes
#9

I’m really curious about the witch down the street. Will she mystify us with another riddle? Oh, boy.

#10

Your wish has been granted… for I have just now continued this epic story at your request… behold… the witch.

5 Likes
#11

Why is this so entertaining. (Not a question)

#12

This is amazing. Thank you, nerds.

3 Likes
#13

Well now you have to complete the trilogy.

#14

Alright… the final segment in the trilogy that wraps up all the loose ends so far with out damaging any of the established lore, and shines a light onto the future of this truly epic hero and his conquests in this world of horribly ad-libed wackiness and run-on sentences.

Again, sorry I had to invoke a cartoon representation of your image @AdamKoebel It was very nearly @itmeJP or Jesse Cox… I’m still pretty tempted to do a JP puppet, but we’ll see where that goes.

And wow, this story thing really got out of hand. I was just trying to show you real time puppeting and it snowballed into “hey lets say a lot of nonsense as a story while figuring this all out.”

P.S. Notice the added worried and mad eyebrows?? With a press of a key they can be changed up on the fly. How crazy. Such potential.

3 Likes
#15

Jumped the shark imo.

#16

Ok, after all the Adam puppet experiments I realized I wanted to make another puppet, but just go right into the land of creepy and put a little effort into it. So now I have an even dungeon-ier master-ier real time puppet.

Its nearly done and ready to test out but I’m so tempted to set up the little dragon guys on his collar with their own mouths… because… hey… little real-time talking dragon doods…

inprog.jpg519×519 62 KB

Anyways, we’ll see where this rabbit hole leads.

3 Likes
#17

Give it a year until there is freeware that does the same, then I’m sure we’ll have a one-shot featuring this technology. And actually, only JP would need to have the tech, right? Since he could feed the Skype video (or whatever will be used for video calls then) of the cast into the animation software.

Would be really awesome!

#18

Well in all honesty, its probably a huge ask to get this done with the current tech. It’s also another huge ask for the participants as it would be them having to do digital puppetry in addition to their whole RP + game stuff

You might have angry expressions and sad expressions and whatever animations you may want to trigger at the push of a button, and so it would probably be best done by the streamer and not JP trying to handle all of the puppets, but it could be.

@TheDesec is probably right, in its current form it’s probably best for streamers who just don’t want to appear on camera. You don’t really even need a webcam to control these puppets as you can automate stuff like blinks, breathing and could alternately control things like head/hands with just dragging handles with a mouse.

There is a lot of stuff that Adobe is currently figuring out. I’ve seen some suggestions that all of these puppetry controls be relayed to a game controller, that would be a real game changer. But maybe in a year or so some other company will offer it as a stand alone that doesn’t require a subscription like After Effects after all of this stuff is figured out a little more.

Ive seen Star Citizen is currently using a very similar tech in their game so that your player characters actually move in response to you. Check it out:

#19

Ok, time for more stupidity.

(yes, this one I brought into after effects to enhance it a bit, so its not technically ‘real-time’)

3 Likes
#20

Not stupid enough for ya eh? alright…

1 Like