Monday, March 10th, 2025Posted by Jim ThackerCheck out neat AI-trained animation tool HandCraft Prohtml PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"Animator Tal Minks has released HandCraft Pro, a promising Maya plugin for capturing hand animation for VFX, motion graphics or games animation using only a webcam.The machine-learning-based tool extracts the position of an animators fingers from video footage, and bakes it onto any Maya character with a five-fingered character rig.Capture hand motion with a webcam and bake it onto Maya charactersDeveloped by Tal Minks, former Lead Animator at games service firm Steamroller Animation, HandCraft Pro extracts the positions of an animators fingers from a standard webcam feed, and bakes them to a Maya character.It integrates with Mediapipe, Googles suite of machine-learning libraries, and has been trained on thousands of images of hands.The workflow involves a bit of manual set-up, shown in this tutorial video, but users can save and reuse templates for any five-fingered rig, so the work only needs to be done once per rig.Suggested use cases include blocking in hand poses for animation to refine manually, building up pose libraries, and even adding hand motion to full-body mocap data.A promising alternative to mocap gloves and conventional optical captureHandCraft Pro offers an alternative to existing hand mocap systems: both finger-tracking gloves of the kind produced by Rokoko, Manus, and StretchSense, and conventional optical capture.As well as requiring no specialist equipment, Minks claims that it produces the cleanest mocap curves Ive ever seen, and enables artists to edit poses inside Maya as they capture them. The software aroused a lot of interest when Minks announced it on LinkedIn two weeks ago, including from well-known animators and rigging tools developers.Tencent Technical Artist Hans Godard whose own tools have featured on CG Channel in the past commented that it was another reason to get rid of the mocap.System requirementsHandcraft Pro is compatible with Maya 2022+ on Windows only.The software is available rental-only. For freelancers, licenses cost $40/year; for studios, licenses start at $100/year for a single seat.Read more about HandCraft Pro on the product websiteHave your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we dont post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.Latest NewsCheck out neat AI-trained animation tool HandCraft ProAnimator Tal Minks' promising Maya plugin extracts hand animation from a standard webcam and bakes it to any five-fingered Maya character.Monday, March 10th, 2025Tutorial: Creating Production-Ready Hero Assets Using MariMaster professional asset development workflows for VFX with The Gnomon Workshop's advanced-level tutorial.Sunday, March 9th, 2025AMD releases Capsaicin 1.2Check out the new features in the modular, open-source, hardware-agnostic framework for developing real-time rendering technology.Saturday, March 8th, 2025AMD launches FSR 4, AFMF 2.1 and RIS 2.0Check out the new versions of AMD's AI-based image upscaling, sharpening and frame-generation tech, available via its GPU drivers.Saturday, March 8th, 2025AMD launches Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070First RDNA 4 GPUs get strong reviews in the gaming press. But how do they fare in CG apps like Blender and DaVinci Resolve?Friday, March 7th, 2025D5 Render 2.10 adds real-time path tracingMajor update to Dimension 5's real-time visualization software adds experimental path tracing system. Check out the other new features.Thursday, March 6th, 2025More NewsDownload Marmoset's free materials for Toolbag 5Autodesk lays off 1,350 staff3d-io releases Unwrella-IO5 key features for CG artists in Godot 4.4Trimble releases SketchUp 2025.0Tutorial: Dynamic Cloth Simulation for ProductionCheck out free Blender scattering add-on OpenScatterCETA Software launches Artist AccessFoundry releases Nuke 16.0Boris FX releases SynthEyes 2025Adobe launches Photoshop on iPhonePlastic Software releases Plasticity 2025.1Older Posts