Characters and animations – Part 1, Motion capture

I have been wanting to write about this subject for a while, but had not gathered my thoughts around it enough until now since there is so many things I can say about it. I finally decided to split it into two parts, starting with motion capture.

In order to make our feel more alive we needed a lot of characters in our game. The characters we needed were split into three categories; Survivors, Rescue Workers and Civilians. The survivors are the people the player can find when searching with sensors in the game, which is why they were the most important and needed to be recorded first.
The rescue workers and civillians were meant for characters placed in the environment, and at the moment we were recording animations we weren’t sure how many of them we would have time for.

In our team I was the only one with motion capture experience, which meant that I took full responsibility for the process. First of all I started writing up a document of the animations we needed, organized after pripority. All animations were quite simple, as the characters would all stand in one place.

The survivors would only be visible for a few seconds which meant that we could simply record a short animation or a loop. For the rescue worker and civilians on the other hand we tried to think a little further. Since they would be standing in the environment at all times, it would be nice if the animations had some variations. For example, if a civilian has an animation loop of him digging among rubble, there could be a varation playing from time to time where he vipes his sweat from his forhead. This makes the scene more alive and less repetitive.

With our Lead Artist in the mocap suit, we spent a whole day recording a whole bunch of different animations. We used OptiTrack motion capture system, and to get the best possible quality we spent proper time on calibrating the cameras before we started. Since our lead artist had not done any motioncapture before I coached her on some of the does and don’ts. Most important parts were to stay centered when recording, to avoid occlusion on the motion tracker pins and to always make sure to go back to the position they started with when recording a loop.

After having recorded everything we needed it was my time to shine, as I had to clean up the animations in the software ”Motive” to fill in missing tracking information or correct mixed up markers.

With that work finished there was only one more thing to do,
add it on some characters.

See you in part 2

About Malin Runsten Fredriksson

2015 Graphics

View all posts by Malin Runsten Fredriksson →