Mocap bureau experience?
admin
Wondering if anyone's had some experience working with either House of Moves in Los Angeles or Red Eye Studio in Illinois?
We might be doing a project capturing horses, and these seem to be the only two studios that have any experience close to doing it. Our client is a horse-training company that we're pitching a realtime 3d training sim to. They're totally into the psychology of the horse, reading its brain from subtle cues the horse emits to the trainer. Thus mocap probably is the best solution.
I was part of a mocap shoot with ILM a few years ago for a hockey game (that died), but we certainly didn't try to tackle the thorny issue of capturing animals. OK, maybe goalies are animals.
Anyhow the point is I'm looking for a studio that can handle tricky mocap, so anyone have some horror stories? Anyone used either of these two outfits?
BTW, I liked this article about planning for mocap.
We might be doing a project capturing horses, and these seem to be the only two studios that have any experience close to doing it. Our client is a horse-training company that we're pitching a realtime 3d training sim to. They're totally into the psychology of the horse, reading its brain from subtle cues the horse emits to the trainer. Thus mocap probably is the best solution.
I was part of a mocap shoot with ILM a few years ago for a hockey game (that died), but we certainly didn't try to tackle the thorny issue of capturing animals. OK, maybe goalies are animals.
Anyhow the point is I'm looking for a studio that can handle tricky mocap, so anyone have some horror stories? Anyone used either of these two outfits?
BTW, I liked this article about planning for mocap.
Replies
Was there something in particular you wanted me to ask her about the studio?
-joe
Well I'm looking for feedback from people who've used them (or other studios), not really the studio's perspective. Already been talking with the studio director there.
They haven't done horses, but have done other animals... an elephant, etc. They're willing to travel for location shooting, which is what we'd need, they have latest high-end Vicon system, been around awhile, etc.
Looking for the dev perspective.
-R
still, elbows looked loose and flakey. why do the elbows always looks like thunderbirds puppets arms??
(also with any lack of facial expression the final result of rher scoring a goal in some football game made her look fucking wierd.)
you are able to capture facial stuff, however that's a second mocap system attached to your body. and the results depend greatly on mesh topology, animation setup and marker calibration.
for a horse, you'll probably need one hell of convincing motion blending and a lot of editing of the final mocap data.
have you taken a look at shadow of the colossus? they had a quite nicely mocap-animated horse in there and also talked about what was necessary to bring it to the screen.
Yeah, we looked at SOC. We're making the horse the star of the show, and it has to convey the inner psychology of the horse, not just gross motor movements. Thus the facial capture approach. Our client knows horse behavior at a very fine level, things I personally never noticed until they were pointed out.
We do have a pretty cool blending system that won't require a lot of mocap editing (except loops which are the mocap house's job). We're still in pre-production, so of course a lot of the kinks need to get worked out. But it looks good so far.