Introduction to Motion Capture

In the first week we were introduced to the roles and the tasks within those roles for motion capture. From directors to actors and the animators. Luke introduced us to some of his work and the clean up and editing required once the footage had been captured. We also spoke about achieving the desired result to reduce the amount of clean up and edit by giving the motion capture actors props, tools and direction to work with. Some examples that we looked at are below, they include the penguins in Happy Feet and giving the actors/dancers direction as to the behaviour of penguins when they move. The actors/dancers then had to adapt that to the dance numbers.

We then went on to look at other uses of motion capture, which is largely prominent in high end games development. These included the Uncharted games and Beyond: Two Souls. Here we were able to see the props and scenes built to guide the actors. In Uncharted they produced the feeling of walking in sand by giving the actors crash mats to walk on when capturing the mocap footage.