Hi! I am going to briefly talk about how we use motion capture in our development. Now our final playable game will not use motion capture data in-engine at all. Hurray! The reason for this is that it’s not fun to retime mocap and make it loopable if necessary. The animation curves on the mocap skeleton contain a keyframe on every single frame making it a lot less manageable. It is possible to optimize mocap data but the ending result is going to be unpredictable and jittery. So instead we use a custom rig to drive the skeleton, allowing the animator to put in keyposes, control the in-between frames by graph editing and achieve a completely predictable outcome. Also we can’t use mocap because at some point we could decide that we need motion that is really difficult for the mocap-actor to perfectly perform.

Like the title says we somehow actually still use it. Yes, but only as reference. It’s a lot better to see motion from every angle. We also use video as reference and sometimes it’s enough to just look at a coworker or some random people on the street acting stuff out.

When we started working on animation, we got an idea that maybe mocap could be a good way to really quickly get placeholder animations. Unfortunately it was too time consuming and we were not sure if we should invest in proper mocap equipment. The cheapest and fastest way for us was to use two kinects and they did a pretty good job as seen below. 😀