I have chosen to do some research and write about one of my favourites; Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception (2011) and how they used motion capture for some of the animations.

Finding information about the setup was pretty tricky since a lot of the information found was not full explained which lead me on a wild goose chase trying to find out the correct and full story. While some say that Naughty Dog used an in-house studio, others say that they used Sony’s own or even that they rented a space at Culver Studios in California with the help of Sony.

After going through several articles and videos I think that I can conclude that Naughty Dog did in fact rent a stage at Culver Studios and that Sony help to build the stage to the needs of Naughty Dog. The performance stage was an area of 15 x 12 feet and consisted of 80 – 90 Vicon cameras (what looks like older models of the T20 camera from the video above). Unfortunately, I could not find any exact numbers of the cost for the cameras or the stage rented, but we know that the game cost about  25 million to develop so we can presume that it wasn’t inexpensive. Lucky you have Sony backing you up!

Naughty Dog likes to call their set up “performance capture” rather than motion capture since they are able to capture audio as well as motion. This means that they could use the stage for both cutscenes and ingame animations. While the body was “mocaped”, fingers and faces were later keyframed to match the scene. These means that the actors and the models in game do not have to resemble each other.  

According to some, Naughty Dog also used a simpler and smaller set up to capture idles and the like. Since these are only somewhat stationary motion they would not need the advanced set up over at Culver.

A typical cutscene in the Uncharted games usually holds 1-3 actors, but for the third installment they were able to capture about six actors at once. Most of the scenes were done by the voice actors but some stunts required specialized actors to perform.

I could not find any post mortems or the like from animators for Uncharted 3, but I found one from the first game where they still were not used to motion capture and go through a lot of research: http://www.slideshare.net/naughty_dog/uncharted-animation-workflow

Here they talk about the difference between mocap and traditional keyframes and it seems like they chose mocap to capture the realism and subtleties that it brings which can be hard to recreate with keyframing.

Naughty Dog has been using motion capture for the two previous Uncharted games and for The Last of Us and we can be sure that they will continue to use it for the fourth upcoming Uncharted game!

Reflection:

I chose this game/series because it has a certain charm to it which I think is partially thanks to the “performance capture” done by Sony and Naughty Dog and I have been following the development since the first game, long before I  figured out that I wanted to create games,  and I love to watch the behind-the-scenes of motion capture games which meant that even if I didn’t know exactly what and how everything was done. I still had a pretty good understanding of the process for capturing the data. But it was fun to go back and actually appreciate the work they do when you understand the cost and effort it takes!

I really think that this approach worked for them since it gave the series that charm and it has always been seen as “pushing the graphics to the limit” for the playstation consoles, so why not animation as well! It seems to go hand in hand.

What I like the most about the animations is probably the blending cycles between animations and how you rarely notice the cycles. Drake can be walking calmly and all of a sudden something happens which abruptly changes his pace or balance which triggers a new animation. But it is so well done that it seems seamless and you never think of it as just “cycles”.

I don’t think there is anything I dislike with the animations in the game, but I would love to see some face capture for the new game to add something new. While the keyframing is well done, it is not quite the same and kind of breaks the perfection that is Naughty Dog’s animations.