Beginner's mind is always available.
— Rick Rubin — The Creative Act
This was 2013. Connecting a Kinect sensor to Cinema4D and having it record body movement directly onto an animation timeline — the fact that it worked at all was the exciting part.
The setup uses the Ni-mate OSC bridge to stream skeleton data from the Kinect into Cinema4D in real time. Every joint in the body becomes an animation controller. The scene is built from cloners — Cinema4D's instancing system — arranged in a structure where every element is connected to the others. Moving in front of the sensor drives the whole system simultaneously, in ways that no mouse or keyboard workflow could replicate.
That's the point of this experiment. The animation that came out of it couldn't have been made manually — not with that quality of organic movement, and not in that amount of time.
Technical Setup
The Kinect sensor streams skeleton tracking data via Ni-mate as OSC (Open Sound Control) messages. These are mapped onto a Cinema4D rig in real time, driving position and rotation across a network of connected cloner objects. Movements are recorded directly to the timeline during performance.
Tools
- Cinema4D
- Kinect
- Ni-mate
- Logic Pro