Hand animate or mo cap

[MrMint]

Dont know for sure but the wow-trailer for "wrath of the lich king" was handanimated.
Guess both are used but which condition leads to which decision.....no clue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAUiwlt8h3U&feature=related

[Darksuit]

The game studio I work for is all Hand animation. Even with Mo-Cap you will still have to clean it up regardless. Mo-Cap is really nothing new. It just an extension of an older process Rotoscoping. First pinoneered by the Fleischer brothers Max and Dave.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping

one of the inherit problems with both mo-cap and rotoscoping is the dip into the uncanny valley. Sometimes its just better to fake something then try to make it work as it would in reality.

[Remi]

I've never worked in a game studio, and i've never dealt with mo-cap. The studios I have and do work for it's all hand-keyed. TV and Broadcast work and now animation for jumbotron/LED boards.

[Aikiman]

Okay, I just had an idea I thought I could exploit with a plugin and some major development but I think its a bit overkill. I thought I could create some sort of Fight Choreograpghy Planner where animators use a planner to help them design fight scenes and either use that as resource or even export out the rig with baked in animation and intergrate it into their own pipeline.

It has potential but I think its a bit overkill at the end of the day. You could probably watch a few Bruce Lee movies and get an idea of what you want anyway.

[MacF]

Even with Mo-Cap you will still have to clean it up regardless.

i find this to be the case a lot of the time that i ever use mo-cap (though which isn't that often). sometimes i feel like i need to exaggerate a few motions to really perfect the animation task set before me. and the amount of tweaking, as i think what maybe darksuit was referring to, to fix it up kinda equates to the same time spent tweaking hand-keyed animation, if not even longer. but i think alot could boil down to the personal workflow of the individual animator, you know? some people might be able to fix their mocap data very quickly; i prefer tweaking in the between the poses i have keyed - i feel because i keyed the animation myself, i can therefore understand the character's flow in maya a lot better and ultimately spend less time deciding how to tweak it.

[Aikiman]

I saw a short interview on a guy responsible for overseeing much of the digital imagery in Avatar. Most or all of the facial animation was mo-capped, they didnt go into any other animation methods but by the looks Weta Digital use a lot of mocap.

Lets face it though, if you cant keyframe a walk cycle you wont be able to clean up untidy mocap effectively.

[mlager8]

I work in a studio primarily as both a Maya and mocap artist and use mocap almost everyday. I can tell you first hand it really boils down to what you're trying to acheive. I am a great admirer of hand animation and am I'm noway biased towards mocap (honestly hand animation is much more fun and pleasing to watch), but if your going for realism and lifelike human movment you can never hand animate better than what mocap produces. There aretoo many nuiances and slight ambient movment produced just by breathing that is all completley involuntary and can never be hand animated to absolute realism. Hand animation produces perfect arcs and beautiful curves which is absolutley more pleasing to the eye and the exact reason why Pixar never uses mocap but again is exagerated and not realistic in
movement. Also to bring up your point about time, in my case since I work with mocap on a daily basis I can clean up data relativley fast with a good time/fidelity ratio which for my company is golden. We do alot of previs and often have deadlines for complete 30 second spots in 10 days. So like I said earlier it all comes down to what your end product needs to look like.

[Remi]

Just to be clear, in no way am I bashing any kind of animation. I was just answering the question. I agree there's a time and place for mocap, i've just got zero experience with it.

[thehive]

where im at they try to use mocap as much as possible but its getting to be a pain because they want to use it for the dumbest things, not to mention the clean up but also how fast they want it. sometime the captures has flipping so i have to hand fix it an make it look like it was part of the capture. when i could have jus hand animated in 1/2 the time.

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