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PlayStation (Games) XBox (Games) Entertainment Games

Motion Capture Or Animation For Games? 38

Posted by simoniker from the move-motion-keyframe-capture dept.
Thanks to TotalGames.net for their article discussing whether videogames should use traditional animation or motion capture to capture the movements of in-game characters. The piece points out: "One of the major problems with motion capture is the way that moves can sometimes appear disjointed and separated, as a character goes from one set of moves to another", but an advocate for motion capture comments that the process is "..a lot faster, as long as you can retain the subtleties from the point of motion capture to the raw data to the point where it reaches the engine." Can you tell the difference?
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Motion Capture Or Animation For Games? More

Motion Capture Or Animation For Games?

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  • Motion capture (Score:5, Insightful)

    by recursiv ( 324497 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @12:16AM (#6781766) Homepage Journal
    Hand animation never seems to capture the feeling of "weightiness" properly. The models just jerk around as if they had no mass or center of gravity. With motion capture, the center of gravity is always apparent, and the model doesn't seem like a hollow marrionette.

    • Re:Motion capture (Score:5, Interesting)

      by neostorm ( 462848 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @12:43AM (#6781886)
      If the animator is any good, the sense of gravity and weight is much better in models animated by hand, rather than motion capture.
      Motion capture will always look more realistic, but so far there is a severe lack of animation skills in the industry. Mark of Kri and Jak and Daxter (both for PS2) are the only games I can think of off the top of my head that have well done character animation by hand.

      In the end it comes down the type of game you're creating. You would never give a colorfully animated character a motion captured animation set, and giving realistic people exaggerated animations would give the game an entirely different tone.
      • ICO (for PS2) is another example of a game with excellent hand animated characters. Here it is very appropriate to use, because the game does not try to have totally realistic graphics.
        • Interestingly enough, ICO was driven by a really (insanely) advanced inverse kinematics setup. Some of the animation was animated by hand when it came to general leg movement and attacking, but the rest of it was all dynamically performed by the sweetest character rigging and weighting ever to grace a game itself.
          The designers should have been commended on this technical feat alone.

          Either way, you're correct and the animation in ICO was done by hand for the most part. I wish I hadn't forgotten that one b
      • Day of Defeat [dayofdefeat.net] has all hand done animation. It is published by Activision [activision.com] and is from Valve [valvesoftware.com].

        I also believe Counter Strike [counter-strike.net] has all hand done animations as well.
    • Remember Prince of Persia? I always thought it had too much gravity in the game. The animation was very smooth too.
      • When you fell, you fell like a 600 pound man:)

        "Another World" did the motion capture thing right. Also "Flashback" (both done by the same company) had good motion capture too.

        There's a place for both in games I think. Motion capture is great, and a must for 3D games, but hand animated sprites still kick all kinds of ass in the right games.

    • Re:Motion capture (Score:4, Insightful)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @01:29AM (#6782070) Homepage Journal
      "Hand animation never seems to capture the feeling of "weightiness" properly. The models just jerk around as if they had no mass or center of gravity. With motion capture, the center of gravity is always apparent, and the model doesn't seem like a hollow marrionette. "

      Well you've been a bit vague here. Possible reasons could be:

      - Animators just getting started
      - Technical limitations such as limited RAM. (Very possible.)
      - Too little time.
      - Motions could have been intentionally simple because when you move the mouse, the character moves according to some equation. Ever notice that when you rotate a character in Quake, his feet just rotate like he's on a pedestal?
      - Intentional design. This may sound funny but maybe they didn't want the character bobbing around if you're trying to snipe it.
      - Bad implementation. Animation is very complex. Getting from the artist to the programer can be nasty, especially when unexpected nuances appear.
      - It wasn't an animator at all, somebody just trying to make the model move.

      I could keep going but without a game in particular, I cannot give you an answer why you feel that way. I do think you're unfairly generalizing, though.

  • Animation v motion capture (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Xerxes of Zealot ( 637155 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @12:20AM (#6781785)
    It depends on the game, am I right?

    I dont want to play Mario and watch some actor whos been digitally captured, I wanna see some goddamn animation.

    Likewise, I don't want to play Manhunt [slashdot.org] and see animation, then I want motion capture...

  • Animator's retort (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @12:24AM (#6781803) Homepage
    This guy is the animation advocate. His arguments are less than impressive:
    ...computer processing...takes out the creative flair that brings a character to life, thus making characters maybe more lifelike but somewhat lacking in life.

    Well, that clarifies it. More lifelike, but lacking in life.

    Obviously, animating traditionally takes longer than motion capture but you do have to spend a lot of time processing the data...So in a lot of cases a skilled animator...will achieve the same if not better results in not much more time than if the moves were motion captured. Motion capture is probably quicker....

    So it takes longer, but in some cases it maybe traditionally isn't longer, but it's probably not quicker. Other great quotes:

    Motion capture cannot always capture the sheer fluidity that many athletes possess and as a result this supposed realism can sometimes undermine all the motion capture artists' hard work.

    Actually, that is the entire point of motion capture: It captues the fluidity of the actor exactly.

    • "Actually, that is the entire point of motion capture: It captues the fluidity of the actor exactly."

      Eh not exactly. Mocap has two problems.

      1.) Capture's not always perfect. There are glitches. Bad tracking. Etc. You get a very noisy graph for each channel, and they are prone to error. Imagine a sound wave. If you take a tape recorder and record a solid tone, you'll see that the tone doesn't generate a perfect wave. Lots of tiny little zig-zags there. The more 'perfect' the mic and capture equi

    • Re:Animator's retort (Score:3, Insightful)

      by clambake ( 37702 )
      Actually, that is the entire point of motion capture: It captues the fluidity of the actor exactly.

      Actually, I see this as one of the main problems. Since the actors aren't really hurtling off 600 foot towers or doging real mini-missles fired by real mech commandos, the movements seem "wrong" somehow. They are all done in a green room with little reflective ping-pong balls which makes even the best actor lose some of his natural motivation. Without the set and scenery, he has a hard time "acting natura

      • Re:Animator's retort (Score:4, Interesting)

        by SuiteSisterMary ( 123932 ) <slebrun AT gmail DOT com> on Monday August 25, 2003 @08:50AM (#6783534) Journal

        Depends on what you're doing, actually.

        With Rainbox Six, for example, they took a man, punched him *really hard* in various spots with a pole, and recorded him falling down. That simulates being shot.

        The problem with this, or course, you see in games like Splinter Cell; Sam's running, or jumping, or rolling, or shooting. But he can't really run into a jump, miss, land, roll into a shooting stance and start peeling off rounds.

        But nowadays, with tons of processor, and a good physics model, it can be just as good to build your models properly, and let the engine figure it out. Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri, Die By The Sword (I believe) and Oni, for example, played with this early on; Unreal Tournement 2003 seems to be the current champ.

        Myself, for video games, I'd avocate using mocap to more accurately build your models and tweak your physics engine, then let the engine actually do things. When my model's running up a hill, I want to see him leaning forward to place his center of gravity. When he gets shot, I want to see him fall back, then down, then start rolling down the hill. When he's lying on the ground, I want to see his arm tracking where I'm aiming; I want to see him use his other arm to lift himself up off the ground.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • My understanding was that he was hand animated based on motion capture/actors doing things.

            Let me, however, re-phrase my point. If you consider the two main methods of animating a model to be 'pre-defined motions' and 'dynamically generated,' then mocap, by definition, is type one. And it shows.

            You can get type 1.5 by key-frames and interpolation, but type 2 is where I'd like to see things wind up.

        • With Rainbox Six, for example, they took a man, punched him *really hard* in various spots with a pole, and recorded him falling down. That simulates being shot.

          Actually, I doubt this worked. I've seen people shot, and most of the time they just stand there for a second, totally unaware of what just happened, and the drop. A pole moves too slowly and will knock you down in a way that a bullet might not.

  • This is not an absolute (Score:4, Insightful)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @12:35AM (#6781848) Homepage Journal
    If you can tell the difference either way, then the method was not implemented properly. There is no "is one better than the other?" there's only "which is best for the job."

    Consider this: If you want to use mocap, but it causes wiggly meshes, then you have an implementation problem. Do you write the code or adjust the model/actor to solve it, or do you use the video as reference and manually keyframe it? Do you even care? Will the gamer care? Is it worth the money?

    I realize this isn't exactly a either/or type of discussion, but it will quickly turn into one. One guy will have seen bad mocap, another will have seen bad keyframing. Done right, either technique will be extremely convincing. It's fun to discuss, but let's keep this out of the realm of absolutism.

  • State of the Art combines the best of both (Score:4, Informative)

    by cying ( 132283 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @12:57AM (#6781936) Homepage
    I strongly urge anyone who wishes to learn more about current research in combining motion capture with animation (similar to image-based rendering techniques applied to the motion domain) to look at these links, one from this year's SIGGRAPH, and a link to several other papers on the topic. SIGGRAPH 2002 had a special track on this (and the bibliography is cited as well).

  • How about a combination of both? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cloudless.net ( 629916 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @01:03AM (#6781963) Homepage
    Who says motion capture has to be disjointed and separated? If you insert appropriate animations between different captured actions, the result could look very smooth. Just because many games have crappy motion capture doesn't mean the technology is flawed, we are just waiting for someone to do a better job.
    • "Who says motion capture has to be disjointed and separated? If you insert appropriate animations between different captured actions, the result could look very smooth. "

      Your heart is in the right place, but in this case what causes disjointedness is the mocap actor not quite matching the proportions of the model itself. This is correctable, but sadly I've not personally handled this area of animation so I cannot explain to you how its done.

      There probably is a relatively simple solution, but the tempora

  • Uh, both? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by GoRK ( 10018 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @01:04AM (#6781968) Homepage Journal
    No matter which technique you choose, there's going to be some degree of animation involved. To make it look right, most often a hybrid approach can yield the best results. Motion capture is fine and good, but what about when you are trying to model the movement of a 50-ton 20-foot tall rock monster or something? It can't be done accurately with motion capture, but you can use motion capture along with traditional animation techniques to create realistic looking physical movement. Or take gun recoil-- motion capute is probably going to produce something very realistic, but using that data verbatim in a game engine will likely result in poor playability. Animation fills in the gaps.

    I don't really see what the argument is about here. There is plenty of work for both the motion capture proponents and the animation proponents!

    • Re:Uh, both? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 )
      "Motion capture is fine and good, but what about when you are trying to model the movement of a 50-ton 20-foot tall rock monster or something?"

      You use a poor-man's motion capture. You video tape an actor (or a creature?) and anlyze its movements. How many frames does it take a step? What frame does it shift its weight?

      Walking with Dinosaurs comes to mind. I watched the making of it, and boy was that cool and insightful. They had these birds that were kind of like pterydactls(sp?) with features simil
      • You use a poor-man's motion capture. You video tape an actor (or a creature?) and anlyze its movements. How many frames does it take a step? What frame does it shift its weight?

        Depending on what kind of critter you're looking for this work has already been done a long time ago by Eadweard Mubridge. You can get some of the motion shots online [nl.net] (click on the links in the right hand nav bar). There are also several Muybridge books you can purchase with all the motion capture shots (both for humans and Anim

  • motion blending (Score:3, Interesting)

    by zaad ( 255863 ) on Monday August 25, 2003 @02:21AM (#6782232)
    There's actually been quite a bit of research [nec.com] to do motion blending [metamotion.com] so that the transition between states are not noticeably unnatural.

    So the real answer is, it's not a limitation of mocap, but current application of the technology.

  • Aki! (Score:1)

    by h0mer ( 181006 )
    If you want the best example of hand animation looking good on real people, check out any of the wrestling games made by Aki, especially the WCW vs. NWO games on N64. Compare that to something like Smackdown for PS2, and it's still 100x better.

    Hey Tecmo, care to bring back Tecmo Super Bowl with hand-drawn animation? I think it would make a football game move much better. Developers need to shoot a LOT of mocap data to make it look better than now.
  • Remember that a lot of animation is done with motion capture these days... such as Gollum in LOTR - and most people agree that Gollum is one of the best pieces of animation around!
  • Check out Splinter cell for the xbox or PC. ALL of the animations for Sam Fisher were not done with mocap. Everything was had drawn and animated and it looks perfect. This isthe type of game that I would have expected to see a great deal of mocap (lots of character movement in different areas) but instead they managed to make a game that's fun to play and visually innovative in the fluidity of the character movements.
  • Looking at games like MGS2, motion capture doesn't seem at all necessary. That game had fantastic animation, especially in the cinematics. Same thing with Splinter Cell, Jak and Daxter, and numerous other games. The only possible reason I can see for motion capture is either as a marketing gimmick (as it was with Enter the Matrix). I guess that motion capture is better if you're basing a game on a movie, so you can catch the subtle mannerisms of the actors (assuming they agree to be featured in the game
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • ...Aside from the aesthetic benefits of animation over straight mocap, many animators these days are hurting for work :P

  • false choice, perhaps (Score:2, Interesting)

    by cyranose ( 522976 )
    As has been pointed out elsewhere, there's a lot of good research on how to combine both. However, the key issues in choosing a method are:

    Animated characters move in non-physical ways. A character can turn its head left to right in one or two frames. A human can't (without injury) and that puts a hard limit on mocap's usefulness there (except, see below).

    Assuming you want realistic human motions, using a realistic human as model is essential. This can be a living human or a high-quality biomechanical sof

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