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Animation:Master has been able to use motion capture for years but it's always required expensive and complicated equipment. Not anymore! Now you don't need expensive equipment to record motion capture! No special cameras, no tracking balls! You can make motion capture from regular video! Get in on the Summer Mo-Cap Challenge! Learn how to do mo-cap for your A:M characters! There will be prizes including a $25 Hash Store credit for everyone who enters. "Follow" to this thread to stay up on developments (button in upper right corner) Learn to... Cap Your Mo! 1 Shoot some action video I recommend you try something simple for your first attempt. 2 Edit your video 3 Convert your video to motion capture Deepmotion.com will convert your cellphone or camcorder video to a motion capture file. Their free account lets you convert up to three video clips of up to 10 seconds each per month. You have lots of chances to try your hand at mo-capping... for free! 4 Constrain your character to the mo-cap object Your motion capture file becomes an Action Object in A:M that your character will follow. Update: see "Version Trouble" post below about a bug in v19 and about using v18 for this step Part 1 (hip and legs) Part 2 (arms and spine)... Bonus tut: Matt Campbell has an alternate mo-cap process you may find useful... Matt's Video Fully constrained result: This is the BVH file I used in the video if you wish to practice with it: MAH01152Dance_Adult_Male_Alt.bvh What about the hands and fingers? We'll cover that later. 5 Use your animation in a chor Dress up your mo-cap animation with scenery, props and lighting! Video... coming soon. 6 Show your work! I bet you can think of more interesting things to do with mo-cap and your characters than I did! Maybe you can tie together a few different shots into a small story? Post your experiments and questions and comments in this thread! 7 Enter! Entries due in by October 31 November 28 December 20 Update: the Contest is concluded (see winners here)but you can still qualify for the $25 participant prize with an entry before end-of-Summer 2023! Pick out your most interesting work and submit it. Everyone who enters will get a $25 Hash Store credit! Basic guidelines: -Use your original A:M character, not a stock character. -Your entry will include both your animation and your mo-cap video. You can put the video before the animation or after. -Of course, all your characters and animation will be modeled and rendered in Animation:Master! -Everyone wins in this Challenge but we might have a vote among all the entrants for a favorite entry. So if you want to vote... you have to enter! -Subscribe to this thread to stay up on developments Entries due in by October 31 November 28 December 20 If you are uncertain about any step... contact me! Have fun! Lets see some cool A:M stuff!

What I find interesting / scary: What will all those people do in future? Close to everything is sooner or later possible to be generated by AIs. That means highly qualified, life long learners will no longer be needed to produce art or entertainment (or sooner or later anything else). So we do no longer need hundreds of people to produce a movie in SoundDesign, FX work, Art Design, etc. but maybe 10. Where do the others go? And what happens if 99/100 persons are no longer needed? We know what happens to many teenagers if they do not get an aim to strive for anymore. The way it was before was, that people who were producing a chair by hand moved the a factory to produce the chair in larger quantities. (a worse, less paid job) People can become inventors or engineers but how many do you really need of the "higher level" / "higher education level" people? Less than the once below the higher you go. Let's assume this: A company has 1 CEO, 5 directors, 20 managers, 500 workers. What should become of them in the end? 526 CEOs? "We are just getting more movies..." > yeah... but how many can you watch? I think we already have pretty much enough of them (YT, TikTok, series, cinema) and it will be MANY more in future. And if everybody is watching a different one... how should any movie maker make enough money to live from it? Or in the end: Anybody? Best regards *Fuchur*

Thom volunteered to get me going...that's him and a decal

It is a tricky juncture. People will stop moving forward as you say. And artists who have developed distinctive styles simply become (unpaid) contributors as less talented people glom their styles and run with it. I saw one person wrote in the prompt: "Sponge Bob as painted by Kandinsky" and what came out was a fall down funny version of what Vassily Kandinsky might have done with Sponge Bob. Tough to compete with AI. The fact that AI is now moving into animation is also scary. What a lot of animation has is that it is not portraying actual motion but it is caricaturing actual motion. Nobody bounces like Mickey Mouse when they walk...but given the power of AI, you will soon be able to say, "give me a Tex Avery walk" and the AI will have studied the spacing of Tex Avery timings and come up with a passable version. Hmmm...