Using Kinect to Create Flash Animations with Awesome Animator
by Administrator on Jun.21, 2011, under Animating Tips
If you want to create a quick animation then instead of animating every frame by hand wouldn’t it be simpler just to scan in some human motions and use those? Well now if you have a Kinect that is exactly what you can do!!! Just plug your Kinect into your PC (you may need a separate power adapter if your Kinect cam bundled with your XBox or if you bought your Kinect separate from your XBox it should plug straight in with the USB).
Now you will need some software which turns your actions captured on the Kinect into a motion capture file (BVH). You can download some free software from the Brekel website.
Now do a little dance, jump up and down and capture your motions. Save them as a BVH file.
You can then import this BVH file into Awesome Animator (make sure you download the latest version) to create a Flash animation. The animation will show your movements as a stick figure but you can change these by double clicking on a rectangle and changing it for a different graphic.
Here is an example of importing a BVH file to Awesome Animator. (This one is of a horse but the same principle applies.) I have changed the head from a rectangle to something more interesting.
If you don’t have a Kinect you may be able to download some free BVH files that others have created.
Once you have made some good animations you can put them on your website or share them with your friends and don’t forget to mention they were made with Awesome Animator!!!
Digital Puppetry
Just because you are a human it doesn’t mean your animation must be of a human. For example, you could use your arms to pretend to be the jaws of crocodile. Then when you import the BVH file into Awesome Animator simply delete all the layers except for the arms (which will now be jaws) and use them as the basis of an animation!!!
You can combine multiple captures. For example first capture your body. Then capture your arm gestures again but this time use them for animating the mouth of your character.
A third capture could use your arms to animate a claw.
You can add different captures for different characters by importing the BVH inside different MovieClips.
Now just export your animation as a Flash (SWF) file!!!
July 8th, 2011 on 12:11 pm
Awesome!
Good job!
August 6th, 2011 on 5:32 am
Paul is right about being able to download lots of free bvh files. Go to — https://sites.google.com/a/cgspeed.com/cgspeed/motion-capture/cmu-bvh-conversion — to quote a note on that page … you will find and be able to download ‘ the entire set of 2548 human motions from the Carnegie-Mellon Graphics Lab Motion Capture Database. This is a large set of professionally-captured human motions of a wide variety of types, suitable for use in animation software, which has not previously been available in BVH format.’
August 6th, 2011 on 5:45 am
Just to add a bit more: two useful programs for anyone experimenting with bvh motion-capture files are these: BVH VIEWER – http://vipbase.net/bvhviewer/ and the unfortunately-named BVH HACKER – http://www.bvhacker.com/ These certainly allow you to get an idea of what files look like and, in at least one case’ to carry out edits or re-scaling. (Can’t remember if both allow that sort of thing).
August 6th, 2011 on 5:48 am
Not sure if my last message got through. Just to say that you can find two useful free programs for viewing and possibly editing bvh files before importing them into Awesome Animator or any other compatible animation program. Look for BVH VIEWER and BVH HACKER (The last one has an unfortunate name – it’s nothing illegal).