Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/10459
Motion Capture& Keyframe Venice, CA’s Motion Theory (www.motion- theory.com) provided animation for this NCAA March Madness Huddlespot out of Y&R/SF. “Because we were out to recreate reality, we knew we needed to use a com- bination of the two techniques: mocap to get the broad strokes and keyframe to cre- what technique to use, we tend to look at a sequence and ask what will make it look the most believable and entertaining, and what will facilitate the storytelling most effectively.” One of the biggest differences between working with keyframe versus motion cap- ture is time. “Pushing a large amount of ani- mation through our pipeline with talented animators doing high-level, realistic character animation takes a lot of work and a lot of time,” he explains. “With motion capture, you get a massive head start that you can use as is or as a basis for something you would animate further — almost like a painting with motion.” Taylor points to an example of recording ate and fine-tune the all-important details,” explains CG supe Danny Zobrist. “To create the movements and speech of Coach Wooden, we started with mocap as a base to infuse our blocking with realism and im- perfection that is difficult to create from scratch.We then used extensive keyframe to create the details of the performance.” mocap data of a martial artist and handing it over to an animator to exaggerate the movements — making it more superhero- like.“That happens a lot,” he says. In addition to time, another thing that dri- ves the studio’s use of mocap over a tradi- tional keyframe approach is when a project requires human-like movements.“There is a subtlety to human motion and a chaos to it that is extremely difficult to replicate through traditional 3D keyframe tech- niques,” explains Taylor. “There is a subtlety to the way we move that when your eye looks at a 3D monster in some game and it was hand animated you might think it looks wonderful, but if you see a great motion capture actor’s motion applied to that mon- ster it’s going to have a level of believability that is more tangible and more connected to reality for your brain to buy into.” Pendulum is often taking full-body motion capture and applying it to monsters and characters of all types.“By capturing full per- formance — the body’s capture, along with fingers and facial capture — from an actor and applying it to a human-like digital char- acter, you get more of a one-to-one transla- tion, and the value is inherently obvious.” With motion capture, the studio can also exaggerate a performance from changing a person’s gait to dragging their elbows to making an ordinary yell into an open mouth scream. Along with a range of proprietary tech- nologies, Pendulum owns a PhaseSpace mo- tion capture system.“We chose PhaseSpace for various benefits it had over a Vicon or Motion Analysis solution, despite the fact it continued on page 39 Janimation’s Mike Duffy: “If we are shooting for a cartoony feel, we’ll use keyframe, where you have a little more control over push- ing the performance.” A N I M A T I O N