ABSTRACT
Motion capture of puppets, or “puppetry capture,” involves capturing a puppet's movement that a puppeteer creates. Markers are attached to the puppet and the puppeteer's motion is captured indirectly. In puppetry capture, a puppeteer manipulates a puppet with his/her hand. This motion may become a digital character's foot or eye or something else. Puppetry capture merges motion capture and puppetry art to create a unique hybrid. Puppetry capture is not new. One example would be where people have captured the motion of prosthetics and magnetic markers embedded in puppets. One of the benefits of puppetry capture is that one doesn't need to retarget the puppets at all because one can build a physical puppet to the exact proportion of a three dimension puppet (or vice versa). Puppetry capture allows to think about a puppeteer's movements and how they influence the digital character in different dimensions. Real-time feedback is very important for puppetry capture.
