Motion capture Software

[Headless]

I'm speaking from the perspective of games here but I'm sure plenty of it applies to film/tv too: We use Vicon IQ and Motionbuilder in our mocap pipeline. IQ is the software that Vicon provides with their cameras for capturing, labelling and cleaning up mocap marker data, and Motionbuilder is good for then applying that mocap data to a character and editing the resulting motion.

To be honest, I'm not sure that learning either of these programs specifically (or learning mocap in general), would make someone any more employable as an animator than if they just concentrated on producing great keyframe animation. You see, you can think of dealing with mocap in 3 stages...

1). Capturing: This is typically a very specialised role where an engineer will learn how to deal with the mocap hardware, how the cameras need to be calibrated, marker setup on an actor, and then running the software during a shoot. If you're an animator, you're unlikely to have to deal with this bit of the pipeline. You might be involved in directing a shoot, but typically the actual capturing will either be outsourced, or an expert will be hired when a studio first decides to buy their own mocap hardware. Alternatively, someone at the company will have been taught to deal with the capture equipment by a Vicon engineer when it was first bought. Either way, you're better to learn capturing on the job, as it ties in so closely with the hardware that you really need a capture studio to learn it, plus it isn't very well documented and people tend to learn it from someone else who knows how to operate all the gear, rather than books or the web.

2). Labelling and Processing: When capturing, sometimes the markers won't get picked up properly as the actor hunches over, when limbs cover the torso, when stage furniture and props get between the markers and the camera, and so on. When these markers are covered, they're missed from the reconstruction, so their positions need to be estimated using their relative positions to non-occluded markers. Sometimes working out those positions will be part of an automated process, or dealt with by an outsourcer, but other times it'll be a manual process that the animators would deal with as part of the pipeline. Again, I wouldn't bother learning this until you were on the job. It's another one that's not very well documented, plus it's a really easy process that anyone can learn in an hour or so, so it's not going to add much to your CV.

3). Animating and Editing: This is the bit in Motionbuilder that an animator would do. Here you animate fingers, fix foot slide, fix motion issues cause by proportion disparities between the mocap actor and the game character, crop and loop cycles, push the motion to be more expressive, add props, add root motion, etc etc. This is potentially an area where you could learn something and where it might have some value on your CV. That said, for the most part this aspect of the pipeline requires exactly the same skills as keyframe animation, and showing keyframe animation on your reel (versus mocap), is a much clearer way of demonstrating your animation ability. Showing mocap can make it tough to discern how much of the motion was a result of your work, and how much was a result of the capture. A superb capture set-up with many cameras, a good marker set-up, and a great actor, can produce fantastic motion before the animator has even started editing. It's not that including mocap on your reel will harm you, but we've turned down applicants before because their reel was so full of mocap that it was tough to tell if they were good animators or not.

So in general I'd say that if you want to make yourself as employable as possible, don't worry about mocap for now, just concentrate on being the best keyframe animator you can be. That's what's going to get you the job.

If you want to work in games and you absolutely have to do something in addition to awesome keyframe animation, I'd suggest trying to put together some of your animations into a working/playable system using mod tools like UDK (http://www.udk.com/). A lot of the time animators will just animate and a programmer or technical artist will put those animations into the game, but at some studios animator's are responsible for building the "animation state machines", and putting their motions into a working system. Showing experience with that can help your employability at some places, although again, don't let working on that come at the expense of your keyframe animation.

Hope that's been helpful. :)

[stacey1983]

Thank you Dan :) I found your advise really helpful and I understand what you are saying about the three stages. At least now I know where to go about it in the future, again cheers

[YKarbaschi]

I'm speaking from the perspective of games here but I'm sure plenty of it applies to film/tv too: We use Vicon IQ and Motionbuilder in our mocap pipeline. IQ is the software that Vicon provides with their cameras for capturing, labelling and cleaning up mocap marker data, and Motionbuilder is good for then applying that mocap data to a character and editing the resulting motion.

To be honest, I'm not sure that learning either of these programs specifically (or learning mocap in general), would make someone any more employable as an animator than if they just concentrated on producing great keyframe animation. You see, you can think of dealing with mocap in 3 stages...

1). Capturing: This is typically a very specialised role where an engineer will learn how to deal with the mocap hardware, how the cameras need to be calibrated, marker setup on an actor, and then running the software during a shoot. If you're an animator, you're unlikely to have to deal with this bit of the pipeline. You might be involved in directing a shoot, but typically the actual capturing will either be outsourced, or an expert will be hired when a studio first decides to buy their own mocap hardware. Alternatively, someone at the company will have been taught to deal with the capture equipment by a Vicon engineer when it was first bought. Either way, you're better to learn capturing on the job, as it ties in so closely with the hardware that you really need a capture studio to learn it, plus it isn't very well documented and people tend to learn it from someone else who knows how to operate all the gear, rather than books or the web.

2). Labelling and Processing: When capturing, sometimes the markers won't get picked up properly as the actor hunches over, when limbs cover the torso, when stage furniture and props get between the markers and the camera, and so on. When these markers are covered, they're missed from the reconstruction, so their positions need to be estimated using their relative positions to non-occluded markers. Sometimes working out those positions will be part of an automated process, or dealt with by an outsourcer, but other times it'll be a manual process that the animators would deal with as part of the pipeline. Again, I wouldn't bother learning this until you were on the job. It's another one that's not very well documented, plus it's a really easy process that anyone can learn in an hour or so, so it's not going to add much to your CV.

3). Animating and Editing: This is the bit in Motionbuilder that an animator would do. Here you animate fingers, fix foot slide, fix motion issues cause by proportion disparities between the mocap actor and the game character, crop and loop cycles, push the motion to be more expressive, add props, add root motion, etc etc. This is potentially an area where you could learn something and where it might have some value on your CV. That said, for the most part this aspect of the pipeline requires exactly the same skills as keyframe animation, and showing keyframe animation on your reel (versus mocap), is a much clearer way of demonstrating your animation ability. Showing mocap can make it tough to discern how much of the motion was a result of your work, and how much was a result of the capture. A superb capture set-up with many cameras, a good marker set-up, and a great actor, can produce fantastic motion before the animator has even started editing. It's not that including mocap on your reel will harm you, but we've turned down applicants before because their reel was so full of mocap that it was tough to tell if they were good animators or not.

So in general I'd say that if you want to make yourself as employable as possible, don't worry about mocap for now, just concentrate on being the best keyframe animator you can be. That's what's going to get you the job.

If you want to work in games and you absolutely have to do something in addition to awesome keyframe animation, I'd suggest trying to put together some of your animations into a working/playable system using mod tools like UDK (http://www.udk.com/). A lot of the time animators will just animate and a programmer or technical artist will put those animations into the game, but at some studios animator's are responsible for building the "animation state machines", and putting their motions into a working system. Showing experience with that can help your employability at some places, although again, don't let working on that come at the expense of your keyframe animation.

Hope that's been helpful. :)Thank you Dan. I'm working in a mocap studio and we use MXF40 cameras and Vicon Blade. I'll use your suggestion to enhance my CV.

[Headless]

To note, I can only speak from my own experience of working with mocap and what we look for when hiring animators. It could be that other studios have drastically different pipelines or place a higher value on applicants with experience cleaning up mocap specifically.

[Simian Space Man]

So in general I'd say that if you want to make yourself as employable as possible, don't worry about mocap for now, just concentrate on being the best keyframe animator you can be. That's what's going to get you the job.

If you want to work in games and you absolutely have to do something in addition to awesome keyframe animation, I'd suggest trying to put together some of your animations into a working/playable system using mod tools like UDK (http://www.udk.com/). A lot of the time animators will just animate and a programmer or technical artist will put those animations into the game, but at some studios animator's are responsible for building the "animation state machines", and putting their motions into a working system. Showing experience with that can help your employability at some places, although again, don't let working on that come at the expense of your keyframe animation.




As an animator Who has previously worked on the past three years of Harmonix games, and has now moved on to Rockstar, I agree. The key to getting mocap jobs is being a great key frame animator. Know motion builder inside and out. The capture and processing end is usually taught on the job if they need help tracking markers or running the capture station. Mocap operators generally have at least a few years experience on mocap sets, and are incredibly dynamic; needing to interact with not only the tech and stage crew but the director and talent. You will be coming in on the ground floor. If you are more interested in the capture end, learn some stage craft (assembling set pieces, video capture systems like real-time final cut, basic video engineer type of things) get your foot in the door, show that you have many skills other than just animating.

This was my avenue into the mocap world. It was a midsized mocap studio operating out of New York. At a larger games company the labor may be more divided.

Good luck!

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