The software showed a 3D depth recording of my motion, which it was able to analyse and use to drive a character skeleton. I took it home, blew the dust off, plugged it into my PC, pointed it out my bedroom door, and walked down the hallway. Some very clever people had managed to get their PCs to take the depth-data from the Kinect, and use it with standard 3D animation packages to produce homebrew mocap software, without the need for big stages or silly lycra suits.Īnd so, I jumped on my bike and set off to Dean’s house to borrow his Kinect. But, there’s an alternative.īack when the five of us were throwing around our first ideas for the Kickstarter, I starting looking into what was being done with the Xbox 360 Kinect sensor. Not only does it require a lot of expensive specialised equipment and software, but you also need a fairly generous amount of room, which is another limitation we have. It’s never quite perfect, as the actor’s proportions usually differ from the that of the 3D actor, but an animator can fairly easily make the necessary adjustments much quicker than creating the animations from scratch.īut of course, this sort of setup doesn’t come cheaply. The great thing about motion capture is you can get huge amounts of incredibly realistic movement as quickly as it can be acted out. With this data, a software package can track the dots from all of the cameras in 3D space, which in turn is used to control a 3D character, sort of like a puppet. The little dots all over his suit reflect infrared light, which are recorded and isolated by an array of cameras (numbering in the dozens) surrounding the entire stage. This is Andy Serkis performing in The Lord of the Rings as Gollum. You may have previously seen images or videos of people in funny looking lycra suits covered in dots, like this: This is what made me start looking at motion capture.įor anyone who isn’t familiar, motion capture (also referred to as ‘mocap’) is a process in which animation data is captured from real-life actors. We’re on a very limited budget, so that isn’t really an option for us. Animation is an incredibly time-consuming task, so animation-heavy games often have reasonably large animation teams.
So, in order to get through the amount of work in front of me, I need a method to quickly create large volumes of animation.
Animating an entire city population is no small task, especially when your entire animation team consists of one person.
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