beatfix studios

At the recent Kinect Glitch meetup, I showed off SenseBloom’s sample script for controlling Animata with a Kinect, via OSCeleton.  A few people asked about creating their own custom avatars.

The simplest way to do this is to use SenseBloom’s example as a template, and draw a new character in place of the one he provides.  This makes it easy to reuse the skeleton data.

Here is the sample character (doll.png):

Open the above image in your favorite image editing software, draw over it, save as a PNG with transparent background, and voila – you have a custom character that should work flawlessly with SenseBloom’s Animata example.  The key is to make sure that all of the joint positions (hip, elbow, etc.) remain in roughly the same place.

For reference, here is a screenshot showing the joint and bone positions.  Note:  do not use the image below to create your custom character.  It is provided for reference only.