Dancing simulation, media content

[abstractcoder]

I wasn’t sure which forum to put this in so I ended up picking here, please bear with me while I describe the idea first then I will ask my main question.

First of all I don’t do the dancing myself; the idea came from someone I know. I have not talked through the idea completely yet so it’s not a complete idea yet. The dancing style is either ballroom or sequence. I know that since they do both types but I didn’t get into detail to which it was or the exact details of the dancing at all.

The basic idea is that while they are trying to come up with a dance routine they have a set of predefined dance steps that they can chose from to make up a routine, I think that there are certain steps that can be followed by a certain set of other steps. What they do at the moment is try and visualise in their head what the steps together are going to look like and then if they think it will be a good idea they would learn it and they try it out to see how it goes.

What the program would do in place of this is allow them to select from a list of predefined steps to put together and then view this as an animation.

Now down to the problem, I am only a programmer and do not have the skills to model or animate a person, so making someone dance for me would be impossible. I think it would be relatively easy to find a model of a man and woman on the internet for this purpose (basically just dressed for dancing), the hard part I think would be getting the animations for the different steps. If anyone has any ideas that would be a great help, I am asking this early as it will make it impossible to do if I can’t get the animations from another source. Myself I think I am going to be very luck if I can find a steps as animations on the internet at all.

Before anyone tells me, I have not put this in the recruitment forum now as I wont be doing the project for at least a couple of months, I just wanted to get an early idea if anyone out there might be interested in working with me on such a project.

Thanks for taking the time to read, I know it’s been a long post.

[abstractcoder]

im guessing that this is not really a popular idea for most people on the forum . im not into dancing myself, its just a challenge for me to make it.

i have a general question then about animation in blender if anyone wants to answer that , if i can find a pair of models that i can use in blender how much work do you think it would be to animate a dance step? i dont really know whats involved in the actually steps but its going to be different to normal walking, i have done a walk cycle animation in 3ds max (was part of my course at uni), but that took me a while and it didnt come out very good.

in the end i just want to try and get an idea if this is going to be possible at all for me to do this without finding someone to do the animation.

[Max.Power]

The dancing steps would have to be generated by you, I think. Dancing presents a very interesting challenge for animators. I'd imagine that animating dancing is even harder than animating a fighting scene. My suggestion is to find a masochistic, idly rich artist with too much time on his hands and send him a cookie in the mail for every keyframe he creates.

[jacmoe]

I am a complete beginner when it comes to modeling and animation, but I think the key to good animations is in the preparation.

I don't know the technical terms, but I think professional animators sets up dummy controllers/bones and code custom control interfaces to make it easier to animate.

Constraints and weights should be setup.

And then you can begin to use these animation controls to flesh out the actual animation sequences.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Anyway, I was surprised to learn how much work is needed before you are able to begin the actual animation process.

[bantza]

I think you would get the dance steps best by using some kind of motion capture technique. Simpliest I can think of is using two videocameras and shooting movement from front and side (maybe some markers on the body) and using this in the viewport as reference for animation. Not exactly mocap though...

[Max.Power]

jacmoe is referring to skeletal animations and bantza refers to what is called rotoscoping in classical animation. All of this is possible, it's just a question of means and resources at your disposal.

[Fredz]

I don't know if it's the easiest way to start, but you can try to find a good rigged character for your prefered 3d modeler and some videos of the dance animations you want to reproduce.

Here you will find a completely rigged character for Blender :
http://www.blendernation.com/2006/03/22 ... free-beer/
You'll need to adapt it so it does look more human, or you can try to use its armature with another model you'll find elsewhere.

You'll find more information about animation in Blender at this place :
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D ... tion/index

And there you will find many videos of salsa and merengue dancing, which can be useful to create the different poses :
http://salsa-merengue.co.uk/Videos/

[abstractcoder]

I'd imagine that animating dancing is even harder than animating a fighting scene.

i think you may be right

I don't know the technical terms, but I think professional animators sets up dummy controllers/bones and code custom control interfaces to make it easier to animate.

i think i remember some mention of that during the 3d modelling module i did at uni.

I think you would get the dance steps best by using some kind of motion capture technique. Simplest I can think of is using two video cameras and shooting movement from front and side (maybe some markers on the body) and using this in the viewport as reference for animation. Not exactly mocap though...

that’s a interesting idea i had not thought of at all, might be worth a shot

Here you will find a completely rigged character for Blender :
http://www.blendernation.com/2006/03/22 ... free-beer/

thanks for the links, i think this one will be really helpful as i can look how they have setup a complete character and see if i can animate it at all

thanks for all the advice, i will have to try this once ive got all my uni work out the way.

[mysterycoder]

You may want to take a look at the Final Fantasy 8 ballroom cut-scene(it should be pretty easy to find). The dance animations are very fluid and life-like. After watching it, you might gain some insight on how to make dance animations.