Hello!
We just set up our own motion capture studio!
T-Pose
Making animations for characters in games is mostly about finding out what looks and feels good and what doesn’t. The first pass of an animation is almost never the final one. Animations need to be re-done over and over in different versions, to find the ones that you want to use in the final product.
When we were making enemy prototypes for Bulletstorm we constantly encountered the same problem. We were here, and the nearest motion capture studio was 300km away. That obviously was a huge bottleneck when it came to making new versions of animation sets. We had to wait until the requests for new animations piled up, book a whole day of motion capture session, record it and then wait a week or two for the results. During this time the designers very often changed their minds and didn’t need those animations anymore, or they invented new ones that had to be recorded.
We realized that purchasing our own motion capture cameras and suits will greatly increase the efficiency and speed of making prototypes. We did a little research and decided on a small setup with a short turnaround time. Though the capture area isn’t big (a few square meters), the quality of the movement data is amazing. We, the animators, are really excited about this, so we did a short movie presentation. Enjoy!
So, does that mean we’re getting pretty, smooth and amazing animations on the sequel?
How many cameras and how big is the studio? It looks like it is a portable one. I have been working with a small 8 camera system at the University of Michigan for my internship. May I ask what program you are using to capture? I assume Motion Builder, but the one we have been using here is by Vicon. A program called Blade. Good luck with everything!
where did you get that, or where can you get one of those motion capturing cameras
It’s a 24-camera setup, the capture space is about 4x4x4 meters. We are able to stream live data directly to a game character in Motionbuilder. Really good stuff for making prototypes
Looks like you guys really have fun.
Childrens dream – seep into the game)
That’s quite a big investment. Therefore, I guess you’ve got some new stuff on the production line. Can you share that with us, yet?
Man this looks nice, makes me want to go back and build a few maps like we used to do with GRAW map editor.
LOL I bet it does not take 14hours to render a map on your render farm.