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Oct. 31st, 2005 08:59 amLike I don't have enough to do today, some doofus has got to write a wrongheaded email about mo-cap. The original post was a little confused as well, merely labelling mo-cap 'creepy' in some cases without trying to work out why. But the email.
Damning quote:
Like any action's not reducible to a set of movements. What our magical-thinking pal here wants to talk about is high-res and low-res mo-cap. Yes, if you're only using ping pong balls you can't hope to get any useful resolution in, for example, the face. If your rig, god forbid, doesn't have working collarbones, then no matter how many markers you place in the shoulder area, no good will come of it. I don't really know exactly what was meant by 'muscles', but a good rig can fix that too, if all you want out of it is a bulge when flexed.
The creepiness of Polar Express wasn't strictly because it used mo-cap, it's because it used a bad resolution of joint-markers, and crummy rigging, and lousy cloth, and bad body deformation, and even the models weren't so hot. The recent Final Fantasy movie, I forget its name, but it's got mo-cap falling out of its ears. Most of the time it works really well; certainly far better than the FF movie a few years ago that no one liked and that Nirasawa'a monster design was wasted on. The difference is even visible within the movie: if you compare the crowd-extras with the main characters (all 45 of the bastards), there're two clear tiers of rig-resolution, which are assigned as you'd expect. Instructive, and you get to look at a guy who has doorknockers on his little outfit.
Unrelatedly, I can't stop playing Phoenix Wright. I think the detective is in love with the prosecuting attorney, too.
Damning quote:
Right now with just putting ping-pong balls on people your only able to capture 80% of the movement, in that I mean your only able to capture where the bones are, you miss the rest of the body. The other 20% is the muscles, and it's the difference between movement and acting. If you compare the video of an actor with the raw data his motion capture you will see what I mean. On the video you have acting, on the motion capture you have movement. So then you then have to rely on an animator to do the muscles or the acting.
Like any action's not reducible to a set of movements. What our magical-thinking pal here wants to talk about is high-res and low-res mo-cap. Yes, if you're only using ping pong balls you can't hope to get any useful resolution in, for example, the face. If your rig, god forbid, doesn't have working collarbones, then no matter how many markers you place in the shoulder area, no good will come of it. I don't really know exactly what was meant by 'muscles', but a good rig can fix that too, if all you want out of it is a bulge when flexed.
The creepiness of Polar Express wasn't strictly because it used mo-cap, it's because it used a bad resolution of joint-markers, and crummy rigging, and lousy cloth, and bad body deformation, and even the models weren't so hot. The recent Final Fantasy movie, I forget its name, but it's got mo-cap falling out of its ears. Most of the time it works really well; certainly far better than the FF movie a few years ago that no one liked and that Nirasawa'a monster design was wasted on. The difference is even visible within the movie: if you compare the crowd-extras with the main characters (all 45 of the bastards), there're two clear tiers of rig-resolution, which are assigned as you'd expect. Instructive, and you get to look at a guy who has doorknockers on his little outfit.
Unrelatedly, I can't stop playing Phoenix Wright. I think the detective is in love with the prosecuting attorney, too.
