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 animator’s 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 characters
Developed by Tal Minks, former Lead Animator at games service firm Steamroller Animation, HandCraft Pro extracts the positions of an animator’s fingers from a standard webcam feed, and bakes them to a Maya character.
It integrates with Mediapipe, Google’s 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 capture
HandCraft 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 I’ve 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 requirements
Handcraft 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 website
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