Animating piano playing has always been one of the toughest challenges for character animators. Each key must be hit in its exact place, and the fingers’ motion has to match perfectly. Traditionally, most animators have been forced to compromise, sacrificing accuracy for speed and cost.
Even with AI tools flooding the market, piano animation remains far too complex to automate convincingly. For Het Nieuwe Kader, one of the Netherlands’ leading animation studios, this long-standing challenge became the perfect opportunity to put the MANUS Metagloves Pro, an EMF-powered finger tracking solution, to the test. Unlike traditional mocap systems, the Metagloves Pro are unaffected by occlusion or drift, thanks to their advanced EMF sensors.
Niels, Co-Owner and Head of 3D & Visual Effects, shares how the team tackled the challenge of animating realistic piano playing hands.
We’ve used the previous Quantum Metagloves for years and were always impressed by their ability to capture delicate finger movements. But piano animation, especially realistic finger movements, has always been the hardest thing to get right.
So when we had the chance to test Metagloves Pro, piano animation was the first challenge we thought of. Could the gloves finally solve what has always been an animator’s nightmare?
Because the Metagloves Pro focus on finger tracking, we paired them with OptiTrack for positional accuracy. We attached markers both to the gloves and at the beginning and end points of the piano keyboard. This setup gave us a reliable relative position between the fingers and the keys, ensuring every motion lined up naturally.
What surprised me most was the ease of setup. At one point, our actor was delayed, so we used a stand-in for calibration. When the performer arrived, we simply slipped the gloves onto his hands, and within seconds, he was ready to record. That kind of flexibility saved us valuable time during the session.
Once calibrated, we began capturing the piano performance. Here you can see that in MANUS Core, even the subtlest fingertip movements translated smoothly into animation data. Watching the model play in real time, we could see every twist, press, and release represented with remarkable fidelity.
For us, this was the breakthrough moment: the gloves weren’t just capturing the movements, they were literally a digital representation of the performer’s hands.
Traditionally, piano animation required hours of post-recording work—correcting occlusion errors, fixing drift, and ensuring fingers made believable contact with keys. With the Metagloves Pro, most of these issues were already solved at the capture stage, which meant our time in Autodesk Maya could be spent on what really matters: the artistry.
Instead of repairing broken data, we could refine and stylize the performance:
This flexibility is the real benefit of the workflow: by removing technical distractions, the gloves gave us space to focus on expression, style, and creative intent, rather than just accuracy.
For us at Het Nieuwe Kader, piano animation has always been the ultimate test for mocap gloves. With the MANUS Metagloves Pro, that test has finally been passed.
We also took this opportunity to experiment beyond human performance by rendering a robotic hand driven with the Metagloves Pro. As shown in the video, every subtle movement of the human hand was accurately mirrored by the digital counterpart, demonstrating not only precision but also the potential for applications in robotics, virtual production, and beyond.
With this workflow, what was once an animator’s nightmare has become a seamless process, opening the door to both authentic realism and creative stylization in hand animation.
