MOCAP PAINTING
fall 21'
MoCap Paintings is a study using motion capture technology to track gestural paintings in 3D such that a digital counterpart can also be made. The project was inspired by combining MoCap with painting, but simply capturing a painting in 2D limits the capabilities of using MoCap. By painting on a scroll and using MoCap markers on the paintbrush, not only is the brush path tracked, but also the direction of the paintbrush, which speaks to the quality of the physical brush stroke on the paper. For the digital rendition, a Python script listens and acts as an interface between MoCap software and CAD software Rhino. 3 markers on the paintbrush allow for triangulation resulting in the recording of planes in CAD, which are later interpolated and procedurally interpreted to generate the digital output.
Unrolled Physical Paintings with their Digital Counterpart
For the digital output, the representation of the paintbrush path is determined by interpolating between the recorded points, taking the normal of the paintbrush plane to get the direction of the paintbrush as an arrow, and the tone of the stroke based on the distance between the path and the paper. To also 'unroll' the 3D path of the MoCap paintbrush, an unroll transformation is required to get the flattened version of the digital path.
Raw points and 3D path