Footbag Visualisation in 3D using Job's notation

konterfei · Post by **konterfei** » 14 Aug 2006 01:51

Hey everybody!

I was thinking (for now) of a way to simulate footbag moves in 3D. Obviously like in a 3D computer game (I know there already was some game never finished involving footbag in 3D)... In a beta one could e.g. enter "SET > SAME or OP OUT [DEX] > OP CLIP [XBD] [DEL]" or select from menus and get the visualisation of the butterfly. The whole animation to take a look at from all angles. There would be animations for all possible parts that could be connected by the user/player. I know that the world didn't wait for this, but maybe it would be fun... To learn about computergraphics and animation on the one hand and to understand more about footbag-move-parts and their components on the other... any suggestions? criticism? ideas?

I was just wondering if anybody ever thought of this and/or would be interested to take part in a slow spare time project accomplishing the above... I'm working in a company dealing with computergraphics, a bit of animation, postproduction and so on and I'm currently dealing with motion capture data used for animating movement of persons... To learn more about character animation and e.g. the program Blender I wanted to kick off this neat project (for the long German winter I guess), although I'm not a gamer at all and maybe I would be the person using it least of all...

If someone wanted to take part we would have to:
- learn Blender (as I want to get used to it and learn how to control plug-ins, etc.)
- animate single movements by hand or
- get some motion capture done by good players
- think of a way to parse Job notation into some "processable" language
- get some neat visualisation
- maybe get the whole thing interactive with a nice interface...
...

Just fooling around with the idea... if you see another post in here in 2 or 3 years... maybe I've done it.

Cheers,
Toby.

Program Poser used for animating "by hand" or by imported tracking data.

motion capture system we use (but I might not have access for private stuff...)

motion capture data (another person staying on one leg, if you can figure it out

)

BenRea · Post by **BenRea** » 14 Aug 2006 05:37

YOU ARE A GOD!!!! This is probably the coolest thing since 32's were invented, is this going to be a free program if you ever release it? how many moves are you shooting to get on the list, like are you trying to get all of the moves or are you just going to go with a solid list that doesnt include everything? because the problem with many computer footbag games and programs is that they do not include enough of the moves out there. I hope you find some people to do this dirty work for ya, im sure you will, cheers.

quadgun · Post by **quadgun** » 14 Aug 2006 06:57

good luck.

sidekick · Post by **sidekick** » 14 Aug 2006 12:36

If you were able to animate a list of uptime and downtime components then you could have the entire list easily. so for instance, you could have the basics (mirage, legover, pickup, clipper, illusion, osis, whirl) and then a list of sets (spinning, ducking, stepping, pixie, fairy, atomic, nuke) then you could do things like DLO (mirage+legover) then to for (stepping+mirage+legover) or things like torque (mirage+osis) and stuff like that. IDK, but that should cut down on making every move that there is, and still having a very large list of moves.

Bander87 · Post by **Bander87** » 14 Aug 2006 14:22

I know this would be a lot more complex, but it would be cool if the user could write the notation and the animation would compute it's movements, then execute the move. Such as programming a toy car to move 3 feet forward before turing left for another 3 feet, but TOE> OP OUT blah blah blah. Maybe we could use a drag and drop program for creating the notation. I know some tricks with the same notation as others would need some special programing.

sNale · Post by **sNale** » 14 Aug 2006 23:16

@ konterfei
he are you the guy who is responsible for the CRAPPY robot animations in the Pro Sieben report about the footbag WM n Frankfurt ???

just kidding, you have to explain some things to me in detail about that tool next time we meet!

konterfei · Post by **konterfei** » 14 Aug 2006 23:45

@snale: hahaha! I was laughing so hard on those animations in the report! what a shame...

thanks for the feedback, guys! yeah, I was planning to animate only move components and then blend them together... so a kick-part, an up-time-part, ... and then have a the moves all end in the same body position so it is connectable. (guess there would be 10 or 20 endings for the basic moves ... ending in crossbody, normal stall, to butterfly, ...) still crazy complex I guess, but you gotta have high goals.

this would be another big thing during development: to think of the "uniqueness" of the notation... maybe introduce some extra words into Jobs notation (just for computer purposes)...

COMPUTING the animation would be great to avoid motion capture, but then we are talking about a complete physics for the body to generate. I guess this is impossible. although it would be fun to only have the trajectory of the bag fixed and then get the body set accordingly... uuuh, the bag is still up! then quickly two more dexes! hehehe. if somebody knows a bit about programming inverse kinematics perhaps there could be a bit of hope... to grab only the feet position and move the other bones accordingly. to have feet position set relative to bag position or so... hmmm. starting to think...

so long, gotta go. keep it on.

Lackey82 · Post by **Lackey82** » 15 Aug 2006 02:57

sidekick wrote:If you were able to animate a list of uptime and downtime components then you could have the entire list easily. so for instance, you could have the basics (mirage, legover, pickup, clipper, illusion, osis, whirl) and then a list of sets (spinning, ducking, stepping, pixie, fairy, atomic, nuke) then you could do things like DLO (mirage+legover) then to for (stepping+mirage+legover) or things like torque (mirage+osis) and stuff like that. IDK, but that should cut down on making every move that there is, and still having a very large list of moves.

Good idea, but a DLO isn't mirage + legover, the legover is symple. All symp moves would need a seperate animation, but your idea still helps cut down the total animations needed... though if the same mirage were used for mirage and torque it wouldn't look right at all. A lot of advanced moves have symple components that we usually don't think about, like torque = mirage + symple osis, and most advanced swirls coming after a dex are symple as well.

konterfei · Post by **konterfei** » 28 Aug 2006 00:52

hey there. (back from holiday just now.)

yep. there would be a lot of discussion needed how to break down components of a move... next time I'll try out animations in blender and maybe post some demo (non-interactive) to get a first impression.

If there is already anybody out there to help... let me know.

cheers.

Zeb Jackson · Post by **Zeb Jackson** » 28 Aug 2006 08:02

im currently learning blender, but dont quite know a whole lot about motion capture, or do i have the components to do it, BUT i will help anyway i can!

konterfei · Post by **konterfei** » 28 Aug 2006 08:11

nice! I'll start with blender from scratch... but let's stay in contact and let's take a look at the bone-animation inside blender... try some animations done by hand in blender etc... motioncapture is far later an issue I guess.

stay in touch.

toby out.

JelloFootbags · Post by **JelloFootbags** » 07 Nov 2006 07:12

Been a while since anyone posted...So is this still going on?

konterfei · Post by **konterfei** » 07 Nov 2006 07:27

hi there.

thanks for you interest!

but until now I didn't have much time to learn blender and to organise an agenda. what would cost some research / thoughts would be: how to cut moves into pieces the best way!? - so we can re-use a lot and combine a lot to complex runs...

zeb? still around? next week (hopefully) I'll have broadband at home as well... best time to start crazy online tutorials and research on this in the night hours.

maybe it would be a good next step to think of the mentioned move-analysis! cut into pieces! and the best: anybody can help! people without programming or modelling skills as well!

...guess we need some more enthusiasts on this who would push me as well...

Zeb Jackson · Post by **Zeb Jackson** » 07 Nov 2006 08:38

yeah heh, im still around, but i havent been messing with blender as much as i would like too

animation in blender is a pretty easy concept, as long as your model, is set up to a decent amount of pivot points, the only hard part about it would be the physics.