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New "Power Glove" for the PC
friedmud writes "I just saw an interesting technology demo over at Essential Reality. It is of a "glove-like" device that allows you to interact with your computer. In particular the demo(which is very viewable using the CrossOver plugin) having to do with 3D Studio Max was just incredible (almost too incredible - but hey, we'll have to see) - they put together a model of a mouse in seconds by "molding" it using the "glove". It looks like the SDK is out, and the product is supposed to ship soon. News blurbs can be found at: PCWorld, Yahoo"
It looked to me like the raccoon was built up out of a bunch of primitives (deformed spheres, etc.) That's not much of a sculpting job, really, and not much more impressive than you could achieve with a pointing device like a mouse or Wacom tablet.
Where a device like this *might* be interesting is when used in conjunction with Maya's Artisan tools or Softimage|XSI's weight maps to deform and stretch a polygon mesh by pushing and pulling vertices.
And as for the idea of "most models" being created through a sculpt/digitize process, maybe that's true at the high end (Pixar, ILM, DD, PDI), but your average mom and pop animation shop is likely using the tools built into their software.
A well designed modelling enviroment like Maya or Softimage pretty much eliminates the need to check positioning in relation to axes... most modellers I know do most of their work in the perspective view anyways.
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Two problems (that haven't been mentioned yet): firstly, you now have the problem that the program needs to know what the piece of clay looked like initially. Unless you can always start with a perfectly spherical ball of clay... Secondly, you would need to model the physics of the clay, such as sagging. For all that trouble, you might as well just go with force feedback.
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