motion capture in games

The games industry has used motion capture to animate athletes, martial artists, and other in-game characters. This started with Virtua Fighter 2 in 1994. By 1995 the use of motion capture in video game development had become more frequent, and developer/publisher Acclaim Entertainment had gone so far as to have its own in-house motion capture studio built into its headquarters.

In film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs used an early form of motion capture technology. Actors and actresses would act out scenes and would be filmed. The animators would then use the individual frames as a guide to their drawings.

But I'm trying to discover the latest in innovative Motion capture for games. This is to answer the question, are animators still needed? this is quite a difficult question to answer due to the fact that its only really big game developers that can afford the process, but with cheaper more affordable methods of motion capture using various webcams or the Xbox Kinect which uses infra-red which is a more efficient way of detecting depth. this makes the whole process a lot more efficient as the need for multiple cameras is made less so. One documentary short that really informed me of the process was made by my favourite games studio called Naughty Dog with their documentary of 'Making the Last of Us'

Again I must stress my dislike for bloggers video search engine as it delivers completely different results to standard YouTube. but I did however find the trailer.

The section in the documentary describes how that the performance is captured by the actors using tonnes of cameras spaced around a huge studio space to capture the performances. SO another pre-production process that is involved in recent and up coming games have to go through an audition process to find the right actors.

Any body motion is captured right there on stage but what was also imperative was to record the audio at the same time in the mo-cap studio. Having the actors to perform as well as being recorded was imperative to get an accurate performance, because any time you split up the performance in any way, you lose some of that magic where they deliver a line or do a gesture a certain way, and those things have to be in sync other wise there is something subconsciously off putting about the performance when you don't do it that way. 

"Even the smallest gestures are picked up so you have to always be prepared for the acting to be used in the game" - Mo - cap actor

As well as researching into mo-cap, I had a one to one session with my tutor to mess around with mo cop and body movements using motion capture pro and xbox kinect. It is something I want to look into more but I am a fond believer of hand keyed animation. But at the same time I love the realism of mo-cap.

The role of the animator in naughty dog was explained to me by one of the animators who said their role was to extenuate certain poses, add more weight or small things like correcting a certain hand movement that wasn't picked up by the mo-cap

To answer the question I set earlier, I think that the animator is as valuable as ever, as motion capture doesn't pick up everything due to the technology at its current state sometimes not picking up certain movements or angles