the problem with mocap

man_o_mule

I've kinda not liked motion cap animation for a while but i could never figure out why. Then i was watching a gameplay video of Dragon age yesterday and I finally figured it out. All the characters are in heavy mideval armor but they way they move makes them look like their armor and weapons are made out of cardboard and styrafoam. There isn't any weight to them. Does anyone else notice this and get as annoyed as i do?

I can't seem to think of an easy way to get around this either. The obvious solution is to hand animate everything. Since mocap is a cheap fast way to get animations done quickly i dont see hand animation being used as much. Takes much more skill and time. And with how mocap is recorded i can't think of a way that an actor would be able to wear heavy armor either. Wouldn't it obscure the little balls on the outfit?

Anyways, just thought i would rant and see what other peoples thoughts on the matter were.

ZacD

carry hand weights, wear a weighted vest? There's easy solutions... Is Dragon age mo-caped? As far as I know a lot, if not most, of game animation is still done by hand.

man_o_mule

oops, wrong forum. can a mod move this to general discussion. my bad

pior

Yup.
Also on top of the 'light' acting ... the armor pieces are almost always simply linked to the rig with no bounce whatsoever. Yuck!

DoomiVox

that and they often don't get actors that are the same proportions as the models that they are going to be bound too.

appleseed and resident evil degenaration both have special features that delve into the mocap process and most of the time mocap just translates to 3d models moving as though they were the oddly disjointed costumes being worn by someone who doesn't fill out the suit...think danny davito trying to play big bird..

man_o_mule

yeah pior secondary motion tends to be lacking on mo cap. I think most people just clean up the mocap and throw it ingame instead of using it as a base to get the animations correct. Athough i have to say it does work great for some games. Tony hawk, guitar hero, and GTA4 come to mind. but for those games most people are wearing normal clothes which wouldn't really constrict or make a person move much differently.

Gav

Mocap makes me sad. To me, it causes 'animators' to lack discipline and get lazy when it comes to their job. That may sound like a dickhead thing to say, which it is, but I've seen people flat out not doing something simple because there was no mocap data for it. For me, from an artist's point of view, it also seems to take the fun away from the job - really making animators loose ownership and pride in what they do. I understand that, in some cases, it's the most ideal method to capture realistic movement (sports sims come to mind) but for something fantastical, where the mocap actor would have to poorly act out wearing plate mail and swinging a claymore...why not just get an animator to do it? Wouldn't the results be the same, both guys are trained to mimic reality...rather than renting the studio, suit, time and actors..why not hire another animator to do keyframes? :P

I guess in situations where there are TONS of animations (as I'm sure DA has) it's the most logical choice for scheduling,I dunno...but, like Pior said, the final result just seems to lack life...ironically.

Gav


Edit: "I think most people just clean up the mocap and throw it ingame instead of using it as a base to get the animations correct." <--DEfinitely!

pior

Well and also, cleaning up mocap data is basically a nightmare. One key for every 1/24 of a second ... try smoothing this out!

Isn't 'tracing' over video feedback much easier anyways?

Also I what about the realtime mocap stuff they have on virtual TV characters sometimes. I wonder if the realtime limitations, but better visual feedback, somehow makes this kind of simplified mocap more ... believable? Since it shows the final 'costume' instead of a stick figure. I guess it somehow forces a layer of real acting in there.

Wayfa

I usually don't like how mocap looks.
A good hand made animation pays 100 more.
And for animator.. cleaning mocaps suck ass.

Mark Dygert

It depends on the tools used. Invest in mocap, invest in the tools and animation talent to get it looking good.

I agree with Gav and Pior, its a start not an end but there could be several things holding them back.

- Not enough bones for every piece of armor?
- They lack the technical know-how to rig up the secondary motion and get most of it "for free" and animating it all by hand it too costly.
- Their engine only reads rotation, not position or scale of bones? It gets tricky to animate secondary motion on pieces like that with rotation only and a bone locked scale.

Chances are if they linked the armor directly to the joints for mocap they would have done it for hand animation also. The only difference being their performance would be as stiff as their armor... Hire quality, get quality be it clean up or done by hand.

I've messed around with mocap in my spare time using motion builder, max and biped so I'm no expert but personally I think mocap is not nearly the nightmare it used to be.

Example of clean up and improvisation:
So lets say I have a mocap clip of a chick doing a spin jump of a block but you need her to kick someone in the face before she lands which the actor just didn't do for whatever reason.

You can toss another layer on top of your dirty layer and animate the leg kicking like normal. Creating transitions from mocap to the hand done layer and back again as she lands.

Simple effective and faster than doing it all by hand. In that case mocap was perfect and can be done in Motion Builder, Max and I'm pretty sure even in Maya.

slipsius

for those of you that think mocap looks bad... check out uncharted 2. its absolutely beautiful. Though, i havent played it, only seen trailers.

ScudzAlmighty

this is just a thought, but in a game like Dragon Age aren't there like dozens of possible armours the player could wear? so even if they did mocap the actors with extra helmets or whatever, it would still only look right for a specific set wouldn't it?

i wonder if pyhsics couldn't be intergrated somehow to add adjustable weight to the animations?

actually doesn't NaturalMotion make that claim?

odium

Yeah, Uncharted 2 says hello... Stunning.

man_o_mule

Vig wrote: »

Example of clean up and improvisation:
So lets say I have a mocap clip of a chick doing a spin jump of a block but you need her to kick someone in the face before she lands which the actor just didn't do for whatever reason.

You can toss another layer on top of your dirty layer and animate the leg kicking like normal. Creating transitions from mocap to the hand done layer and back again as she lands.

Simple effective and faster than doing it all by hand. In that case mocap was perfect and can be done in Motion Builder, Max and I'm pretty sure even in Maya.

I was thinking something like this would be possible with layers. Been out of the game for animation for too long.

Yeah, Uncharted 2 says hello... Stunning.

that it does, and i wasn't saying all mocap is bad. just a vast majority of it.

Richard Kain

There are some actors who are really good at dealing with MoCap. They will "simulate" such things as heavy armor in their physical performance, just by using their animation.

But of course, these are few and far between. And the majority of actors called in for MoCap have no idea how to act for a virtual environment. (and their directors don't give them enough prompts) MoCap is a very young technology, not even as old as the graphics it is applied to. Future developments will likely address a lot of the issues raised here. Also, more experienced MoCap actors will become more familiar with the process.

achillesian

just put said actors in 100 pound armor, sounds pretty simple, special made transparent armor if the balls end up being invisible in normal armor

this would also help with the arm freedom of movement and other things like that mocap actors don't realize

Mezz

I had a strong interest back in College in animating, and in my gaming course we actually got to try out moCap from putting on the suits ourselves and cleaning it up in Vicon, and then bringing it into Max.

I thought moCap was pretty cool in a lot of ways, and it was definately fun to run around in those suits... but when it came to cleaning it up and making a final product, I 100% perferred key-frame animating :P

I mean, yeah, it's like BAM, there's the animation you want... but I feel no love from it, so to speak :P I also MUCH more enjoy doing the animation from scratch, cause that feels like art, cleaning up moCap feels like work :P I get it from a company's point of view, 'get it done as fast as possible', but if you asked me personally, I'd want most things key-frame animated

Just my thoughts on the matter