Hand Gestures Puppeteering  (Dec.30, 2020 optimized!)

The plugin had its 1.0 version in 2019 April, and it was builtfor animators with intuitive graphical user interface to drive the hand gestures of a character.
Now this plugin is updated with several enhancements. And we've made a tutorial to illustrate how you can animate with this tool. 
https://marketplace.reallusion.com/hand-gestures-puppeteering



Once again, we teamed up with our power user Adolf Navarro to optimize this plugin. Adolf shares his thoughts and tips in this video:


We've added three main presets (default, male and female) to enhance usability, and enabled three modes of hand gestures puppeteering (left hand, right hand and both hands). Besides animating hand gestures, this plugin also acts as a great tool for editing mo-cap. Read the release note and Python API fundamentals below to know more about this handy plugin.

v2.0 Updates & Benefits Include:

• Added 3 embedded presets: Default, Male, Female.
• Can choose to puppet individual left/right hand or both hands. 
• Freely customize your own gestures to fulfill particular needs in any moment, or for flexible combination.
• Can reset gestures separately or all at once to the original Default preset.  
• Gesture icons can now be replaced with a screenshot or an existing image.
• Blend out recording with original clips by definable frames.
• Added Preview and Record button and activation via the space bar, similar to the Motion Puppet and Direct Puppet tool.

．Blend Mode: Enabling user to chose from 3 blend modes.

．Blend Out Recording frames: Enabling user to chose from 0-60 frames of blending motion clips.

．Preview/Recording: Enabling preview and record functions on panel.

．Hand Gestures Presets loading: Enabling user to load saved Hand Gestures Presets.

2021/Jan/4 update:

1. If you already had download the v1.0 plugin before, please log in to your RL account

2. Check out your Inventory List (Plug-in) and select the purchased date be setting by all.

3. Click "download"  button and you will immediately start downloading your V2.0 zipped file.

4. Install the v2.0 plugin as usual

Version 2.0 Improvements:

Fixes:

*2-Point blend bug.
*Blending errors between the gesture points.
*Left hand capture bug.
*Crash from opening and closing the script dialog window.
*Recording no long deletes original clips within the timeline.
*Discrepancies between the blending parameter and the resulting effect.

Enhancements:

*Silent initialization: removed Console Log print when loaded.
*Changed recording hotkey to "R" instead of the space bar.
*Rearranged the user interface by grouping the relevant controls.
*Removed individual Preview and Record hotkeys.
*Removed influence on the movement of the wrists.

New Features:

*Add separate preview and recording for each hand; Now supports both hands, left, or right hand.
*Added Preview and Record button and activation via the space bar, similar to the Motion Puppet and Direct Puppet tool.
*Blend points are now replaceable with Right Hand, Left Hand, and revertible to Default Gestures.
*Blend point icons can now be replaced with a screenshot or an existing image file.
*Blend point data can now save and load via preset files.
*Blend point icons now scale as the blend weighting increases instead of highlighting in green.
*UI disabled state is now more obvious and consistent.
*Three completely new presets: "Standard", "Male", and "Female".
*The UI will now store the state of the prior session.
*The UI can now return the default factory state, with a press of a button.
*Now supports transitioning between the end of the recorded clip and any existing clip in the timeline.
*End transition period can be adjusted (number of transition frames).

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See the relevant resources below:

• You can download the script from the Marketplace
• To explore how it works, please visit  Python Wiki
• To get the source code, please visit our GitHub 
  
• For more information, please check the Release Notes

Enjoy!

Reallusion Python Team

Cool...
I must admit that I did not spent much efforts on the hands in my animations
except where it really was important for story telling,
Though with this I might start doing so, as it seems quite easy
and the customizing factor of 2.0 is great.
It surely would make my animations more valuable...




Toystorylab on Vimeo :     Crassitudes (my "Alter Ego") on Youtube: 

Hi.

I tried to get the plugin but it says: "*This item is already in your Inventory List or Transaction History. No points will be deducted" but it doesn't show in my inventory (plugin) list. Anyone else has the same problem?

facr

I tried to get the plugin but it says: "*This item is already in your Inventory List or Transaction History. No points will be deducted" but it doesn't show in my inventory (plugin) list. Anyone else has the same problem?

I have the same problem
Greets from Germany
Postfrosch


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Hallo Werner,
you find this here change Date.
Greetings Robert

I love the idea behind this plug-in, because, yes, too often hands look stiff and fake. However, as much as I like the idea, I hate the workflow.

While I will be the first to admit that it may be because I don't know what I am doing, my experience with the "recording" workflow as opposed to keyframing workflow is that it makes it next to impossible to achieve absolutely precise timing. I know, you can isolate exactly where you want it and record it there, but then it overwrites the timeline and splits it at both ends of the recording. So, it is a destructive workflow. And I know you can regroup the splits and then sample whatever you want to adjust, but in my experience, it adds a lot of extra and unnecessary keyframes; also (in my experience) it starts messing with the animation when you do that. 

If we must have a recording workflow, then why not have it write to the gestures layer of the timeline, so that it doesn't overwrite and potentially foul up your other animation?

By the way, this is not a "bash iClone" or "bash the developers" post. I use iClone almost every day in my work, and I am thankful for it. But, as with everything, there is always room for improvement.

Have a happy New Year!

Terry

Hallo Werner,
you find this here change Date.

Hello Robert,thanks for the (repeated) tip.We've had that before.I was on the bottle steamer again.I thought about the search periodis set from 2010-01-01 to 2020-30-12,the part should be displayed.I also have the period 2019-01-01 to 2020-30-12tried and didn't find it.With your attitude it workedthanks
Greetings Werner

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Hi everyone,

I've updated the thread with the instruction of how to download the v2.0 plugin.
Hope this information helps, and please do not hesitate to ask if you need extra help from our side. Thanks!

Heu... How to install this plugin ? There's no installer ? 

Just copy and paste the folder "Hand_Gestures_Puppeteering_v2.0" to the following directory:

C:\Program Files\Reallusion\iClone 7\Bin64\OpenPlugin

Next, run iClone as Administrator. Thats it, installation done. Enjoy!




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System: Win 11_Home, CPU i9-10850k (3.60GHz), 32GB RAM, RTX3080 GPU (10GB VRAM), 2TB SSD, 2TB HDD. It's definitely time for an upgrade!