Human Tracker System

[IroniumStudios]

Ok for a majority of 3d movies and video game cutscenes, there are people wearing funny suits with white nodes on the end, but somehow a computer tracks it all and saves it as character movement. anyone now how they do it?

 

[Spartianintraining]

just to let you know the term is called Motion Capture.



Random fact in one of the mortal combat games there is a character called Mocap and he wore the motion capture suit

 

[Sniperbaas]

From what I remember reading, some guy sits at a computer and manually aligns each little polygon segment/ mesh onto each area covered by the nodes.



It's kinda like in blender where you select a polygon (area between the nodes), and apply a texture/ color to it.





Cheers!

 

[soul products]

what your talking about is called motion capture

traditionally its a bunch of specialized cameras around a room that are made for motion capture. basically they record everything you do through the nodes on the suit the "actor" is wearing. these recording are then processed through the 3d program such as 3d studio, ect. The program then takes that information and applys it to whats call a biped. a biped is a rough skeleton for 3d models. without them 3d models wouldn't be able to move. then, in a nutshell, the motion capture 'movie' is seen on the screen as a series of dots conforming to shape of the wearer, EX. real life shoulder dot is placed in the same area in respect to the virtual "dot" model(head to head position, so on so forth). the 'dot model can then be converted to the biped's apearance EX. height, width, ect and still move as i did before. the moving biped can then be applied to any model regardless of shape to make that model act just as the "actor" did before.



the new way of motion capture is much more complex. its the same way AVATAR was filmed. yes it was filmed not animated(for the most part)its basically the same process but there are no traditional cameras recording movement. its all wireless. the docu. showed that while the real actors were 'filming' there were two cameras, one recording the actors for reference and cleaning the animation and the other instantainiously took all the data from the dot suits and played the 3d movie REAL TIME!!

its was the first live action,real time, animated movie

its hard to explain without watching the docu. 5 stars





hope this answers your ?'s

-soul products-

 

[drgon47]

also, all of Crysis animation where mo cap as well. sure, setting up may be pricey enough, but think of the time, and money saved from paying lots of people to animate by hand.

 

[justanuthercap]

Just for everyones info, I've done both hand animation and MOCAP using Lightwave. The MOCAP is much more natural and realistic as far as the animation goes, however, it takes a TON of cleanup to look right. (If you want to see some really bad MOCAP that doesn't get cleaned up? Check out the NFL games on FOX, that little robot football player in the lower corner. Watch how it's jerks and pops and that the limbs sometimes pass through each other)



So, I don't think there's a savings in manhours or the number of artists working on it over hand animated stuff. It's more a matter of the look you're going for. Like realistic over traditional animation.