Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/65907
SPECIAL MOCAP SECTION Break out the champagne, pop the corks, and dance a jig. After more than 20 years, motion capture has fi nally achieved mainstream acceptance by professionals in the entertainment industry and by consumers. Credit James Cameron for showing people the top of the game with Avatar, and Microsoft for bringing mocap to the masses. Th e 18 million people who have bought Kinect devices for Xboxes since November 2010 might not call it motion capture, but they know they can wave their arms at a computer character and it will wave back. Indeed, today you can fi nd hundreds of enthusiasts, most using systems professionally, on the Motion Capture Society's Face- book, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Tumblr pages. "You no longer see people who don't know what motion capture is," says Bo Wright, director of Motion Analysis Studios. "People are well versed with what the technology does and how it is used. Th ere are diff erences among the vendors, but the concept is standardized." Oddly, given all this acceptance, when you look at the industry from the outside, it seems much as it ever was. Vicon and Motion Analysis off er cameras and software systems for optical capture at the high end; Giant and House of Moves take those systems, add their own secret sauce, and off er high-end service; another group of vendors, no- tably PhaseSpace and Xsens, off er variations on the capture theme using active markers and ac- celerometers to capture motion; Image Metrics and Mova continue to off er facial-capture ser- vices; and nipping at all these companies' heels are vendors off ering lower-cost solutions, such as OptiTrack and iPi. Th ere are a few new players, such as Digital Domain opening a performance-cap- ture studio at the high end last year, and Microsoft bringing Kinect to Windows at the low end this past February. dustry now sees the creative community, which has become well versed in the possibilities, push- ing innovation. Filmmakers, game developers, and animators have a variety of needs, embrace a variety of solutions, and are asking service bureaus and vendors to develop faster, more accurate, and more cost-eff ective solutions—in real time, please. Some call this commoditization. Others use the word "democratization." Words aside, while walk cycles and fi ght What was once solely a technology-driven in- moves are still important motion-capture applications for game developers and for crowd simulations in fi lms, the trend now is to push the state of the art of virtual production. Game developers are using motion capture to create cinematics in ways those in the fi lm industry still cannot. Broad casters are employing virtual set technology to pro- duce new types of on-air graphics. Filmmak- ers have discovered performance capture, "simulcam," and motion capture for shot planning, and service providers are fi nding ways to be fl exible, mobile, and to provide AI•Computation ■ ■ ■ ■ facial capture with more detail than before. Animators who used to videotape themselves to test ideas have learned they can use a low-cost mocap system instead and apply their moves to the character they're testing. In fact, there are so many trends and applications these days, it's impossible to chronicle them. But, here are a few of the most interesting innovations we've spotted. WYSIWYG Mocap for Gaming Th e House of Moves, which is now a division of Vicon's parent com- pany, Oxford Metrics, rather than Vicon itself, serves game develop- ers, fi lmmakers, ad agencies, and, these days, iPad developers, but the bulk of its motion-capture work is for games and fi lms. "We do our fair share of fi lm work throughout the year, but we do a tremendous amount of game work," says Brian Rausch, vice president of produc- tion. "Games are entirely CG, and developers can't have poor-quality data. A lot of game companies have internal groups, and we work with them, but we also see aggressive developers that don't want to grow abnormally large teams coming to us." Rausch is particularly excited about the ways in which House of Moves is facilitating virtual production for game cinematics. Th is is similar to virtual production for fi lm—performance capture applied in real time to CG characters composited into environments viewed through a camera—but better. In the past, the studio has used Autodesk's MotionBuilder to manage the application of motion data in real time to the CG charac- to use them for real-time animation," Rausch says. "When you're working with fi lm production, you can't have fi nal environments; you need approximations, but on the game side, we removed that step. We've written a bunch of streaming protocols to send mo- tion-capture data straight into the Unreal game engine. Th is means game directors can guide motion-capture actors and see the fi nal characters in their fi nal environments. Th ey can look through the camera into their fi nal world." Because the environment is no longer a proxy, the directors ters, and still does for fi lm production. But that's changing for game cinematics. "You have to constrain the environments in MotionBuilder know during the capture session whether everything lines up; they don't need to make a leap of faith. "We still have a fi nal refi nement phase where we push hand poses, postures, and timing," Rausch says. "And, we still use MotionBuilder to animate. We would never dream of cutting animators out of the process. But, we're giving directors the ability to know they got the shot and that they're looking at it in the fi nal resting place. Th ey're no longer working in the darkness." Motion capture at the House of Moves is primarily optical, using Vicon hardware and Vicon's Blade system. "We have 300 Vicon Xsens' MVN motion-capture and tracking systems are popular with game developers and studios that create previs because the inertial sensors are easy to wear, allow freedom of movement, and do not require a camera system for capture. April/May 2012 25