Motion Capture Or Animation For Games?

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?

Comments

Motion capture

[recursiv]

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

[neostorm]

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.

Animation v motion capture

[Xerxes of Zealot]

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 and see animation, then I want motion capture...

Animator's retort

[MobyDisk]

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.

State of the Art combines the best of both

[cying]

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).

• Stanford Movement Publications (2002 and before) - especially Kathy Pullen's paper
  
• Motion Synthesis from Annotation
  
• SIGGRAPH 2002 Publications