Bringing horrible space monsters to life with performance capture tech
Directed by Sean Dacanay. Produced by Justin Wolfson. Edited by Jeremy Smolnik, with Billy Ward. Click here for transcript. (video link)
We've watched the gameplay. We've heard the terrifying noises. We've seen the scary sights. Now, in the final part of our peek behind the scenes of Glen Schofield's upcoming horror sci-fi adventure The Callisto Protocol, we're examining how the characters move-and how the more motion capture you can do, the better your characters will look on-screen.
As Glen notes in the video, Callisto Protocol heavily uses "motion capture" technology-actors dressed in special reflective suits act out the motions you want your characters to make, and computer-controlled cameras capture hundreds of frames per second as the actors do their thing. When done well, "mo-cap," as it's called, can drastically reduce the time it takes to animate a game's characters. Rather than having skilled animators meticulously hand-animate every frame of a character's movements, the raw performance data and movements from the actors are mapped over digital models. While hand-animating can lead to beautiful results, it's impossible to beat the performance one gets from motion capture-since it's an actor actually pantomiming, the resulting movements come with all the grace and subtle nuances with which living beings imbue their motions, nuances that animators have to create manually (and often at considerable time and expense).