Miku Crashes the Superbowl...

[Apache Thunder]

I have spent a bit of time on an animation project and now that it's finished, I thought I would give it a mention. It's the first non BF related thing I've done in awhile.



You may or may not recognize the characters I used, but none the less should be fun to watch even if you don't know who they are.

Yep, animated all that my self. With the help of the Xbox Kinect in many places. Motion capture makes everything better.

[Swaffy]

Nice job. I spy some BFHeroes42 driving, lol.

[Apache Thunder]

Indeed. I found Max scripts that allowed me to export BF1942 stuff into MikuMikuDance (the app used to animate all of that). Thus I can use entire BF1942 levels as stage props if need be.

The interiors were various things I pulled from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

As for the characters, I could use BF1942 soldiers or soldiers from BFHeroes, but the PMD file format (which is the format the characters are in and are structured differently then props/stages) is proprietary to the program and only app out that edits/creates them is in Japanese...and that isn't something I can read. There is a max script for importing/exporting PMDs, but it was intended mainly for editing existing ones and even the bone names are stored in Japanese as well, so even once I get it in Max, the bone names are all in an alien language and editing a mesh to use them would be trying to fly an alien spaceship and trying to read the user's manual, but said manual is in an alien language.

Pretty sure something will go wrong if I attempt to make a new one with it.

[fo0k]

good skills..

anime in general these days seems to be one big excuse to show seemingly very young teen girls in some sexual context.. ?

maybe Im just old. heheh..

[Apache Thunder]

Technically Hatsune Miku is not an anime character (she is a sound bank to a voice synthesizer that can "sing". Sorta like the computer voice for Stephen Hawking, only it sounds much better. )

Though her art design is in the Anime category and of coarse her origin is in Japan so she is somewhat Anime-ish. Japan designs many Anime girls to be "Moe" (their term for Cute, thought the concept is a little different) since the audience for most Anime happens to be male. I believe many can be cute without being sexualized. It all depends on the target audience I suppose.

But I understand what you mean.

I did elevate the camera for the copy machine scene as the physics and how her skirt behaves causes her underwear to be visible more then I wanted them to be. The copy machine prank is one of those office pranks and I thought it would be funny to show that as being the cause of the Superbowl power outage.

[fo0k]

heheh I accept your reasoning whole heartedly..

im still a bit confused as to what the software is that you are using.. it handles the mo-cap..? or you have hacked a kinect?

[Apache Thunder]

Yes the two programs I use (MikuMikuDance and MikuMikuMoving. The latter being the newer one still being updated and improved upon) have roughly native support for the Kinect. So I didn't have to "hack" anything.

I just install the official Windows Kinect SDK drivers for the Kinect. Plug it in, then have MikuMikuMoving enable the Kinect whenever I want it to record my movements. MikuMikuDance is an older program and it was tricky at first getting it to work with the Kinect using the official drivers since it was originally programmed to use the unofficial OpenNI drivers. But fortunately the maker of MikuMikuMoving made a modified DLL file that allows the program to interface with the official drivers instead, so I can use both programs and still have Kinect support in both.

My bedroom is a bit too cramped and small for the Kinect to operate at 100% effectiveness, so the range of motions I can have characters do is a bit limited and what I do end up doing needs to be cleaned up and fixed afterwords since sometimes there is noise in the animation. (like arms/feet twitching sometimes, though it happens most often with the feet).

Recently I've gotten the idea to try and export the BF1942 skeleton to MMD, record an animation with the Kinect and export the animation. Then import it into 3DSMax and export to BF1942. It will be interesting if I am able to make useuable BF1942 animations through this process.

EDIT:

Well fudge. I was able to get the model and skeleton to work in MMD/MMM, but MMD/MMM doesn't know how to assign the Kinect motion capture to the correct bones since the bone names are different. Thus Kinect motion recording wont' work. I can animate them the traditional way though.

[Swaffy]

You're getting quite fancy there, AT. :]