Motion capture users dispel the myths - profile of several motion capture firms

Post, July, 2002 by Christine Bunish

McGar clad a horse from a local racetrack in a hooded motion capture "suit" with markers and placed medical wrap on its legs with markers on it. "You can't put markers directly on a horse: They eat them," he explains. "You constantly have to replace markers on the feet due to the inertia and force of the hooves hitting the ground." The rider wore a black leotard and helmet with markers.

LocoMotion produced several loops of the rider whipping the horse, urging the horse forward and looking in different directions "so it wouldn't look like the same rider each time," says McGar. Using Kaydara's Filmbox software, LocoMotion edited the data and applied it to skeletons built in Alias/Wavefront Maya. "It was very hard data to work with, we did a lot of clean up because the horse kept knocking off markers, and we had to re-create that motion," McGar explains.

McGar doesn't see motion capture and keyframing as an either/or proposition. "It's not a matter of 'versus,"' he says. "Motion capture creates a life-like performance that would be impossible to get otherwise." For this project, the live horse performed in ways that animators couldn't anticipate -- motions of the feet, little shudders that were impossible even to rotoscope. But the animators did a lot of keyframing on top to exaggerate the motion; the artist had control over that. "To be a great animator you have to be able to use all of the tools available to you," he concludes.

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"From a production standpoint, I've learned the need to be very precise in documenting what you do so the direction that's given in the studio is what you end up with in the final animation."

-- Steve Lasky, Visual Book Productions

"Think about motion capture as performance capture, and hire great actors. If you have great actors and a good company to capture them, you'll get a great performance."

-- Michael McGar, LocoMotion

"We recommend a half-day or day of test shoots to get first-time clients' feet wet and to establish a pipeline. Setting up a pipeline after the shoot can take a significant amount of time."

--Jarrod Phillips, House of Moves

"Be prepared; know all of the shots. We fully storyboard and rehearse all the action prior to getting onstage. Motion-capture time should not be used for shooting from the hip."-- Mark Simon, A&S Animation

Giving CG characters a voice

GLASGOW, SCOTLAND -- One of the UK's leading new media companies, Digital Animations Group (DAG), taps LIPSinc's TalkBack SDK (software development kit) to automatically generate the lip animation for some of its virtual characters, which are fed by an audio source.

"We have integrated the TalkBack engine to our own realtime virtual character system," says Laurie McCulloch, development director at the Glasgow, Scotland-based company (www.digital-animations.com). "Our system is unique and can be used for live or offline TV broadcast, games, commercials, live events, Web-based information assistants, CRM solutions, kiosks and information terminals, Intranet systems and more."