I’ve been building a tool for recording 3D motion tracks, camera moves and hand gestures direct to the After Effects timeline with the Leap Motion.

There’s still a ways to go yet on development. I have to create the UI and tweak the hand puppet rig (and, um, make the hand tracker work with right hands…), but I think this is going to be a useful addon for both literal hand-animation stuff like UI demos and pre-animating gestures for Character Animator puppets, as well as more subtle things like organic camera shake.

The Leap is quite precise in its data — you can even tell different people’s hand tracks apart.

Hand:

Shaky camera move:

I’m thinking about calling it handMade. Good name?