Why motion capture is harder than it looks
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- Äas pĆidĂĄn 18. 07. 2022
- The suits are just the beginning of the motion capture process.
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Motion capture has taken over a lot of computer animation for movies, video games, and TV. Coverage typically focuses on actors wearing funny suits and performing feats of imagination. But is it really that easy?
The above video shows that itâs a lot more complex than that. Motion capture requires heavy editing, tweaking, and processing after the actual capture to create animations that look real. That part of the process is key to understanding the images on your screen.
Watch the above video to learn more.
Further Reading:
plask.ai/
Plask.ai lets you try out these tools for yourself. Itâs a fun way to see just how far AI-based motion capture can go.
www.mixamo.com/#/
Mixamo is one of many resources for motion capture artists, and itâs fun to just browse the animations and see how they work.
beforesandafters.com/2019/09/...
As in most things related to visual effects, the site Befores and Afters has countless relevant nuggets of behind-the-scenes footage and deep dives into motion capture history.
Note: The headline on this piece has been updated.
Previous headline: Why motion capture is more than actors in funny suits
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Thanks for watching! In some ways, itâs possible to see optical capture as a particularly advanced form of rotoscoping - which you can learn more about in this Vox video from 2019: czcams.com/video/IS1hCSsmH1E/video.html
1st
Wow!
Thanks for posting this.
You should check out AI Motion Capture: Turning any 2D video into a 3D Animation. We're making Motion Capture more accessible for everyone - no suits, no hardware. Check out our channel for more!
Have you ever heard of wild woody (sega cd)
That little part at the end really shows how little even people in the industry care about VFX artists. Intentionally making it harder for them for no reason.
I think it's unintentional. I think vfx artist are often not brought in to talk with the directors and cinematographers, which create these avoidable problems.
@@Xob_Driesestig SO true. There's very little creatives that care about their vfx artists and their crafts. The likes of Denis Villeneuve, Matt Reeves, Zack Snyder, James Cameron among others.
They don't care enough to listen and understand why their proposed process isn't the best idea is the problem.
It reminded me heavily of some of the student productions I've worked on in the past while I was in-charge of post-production. Sometimes the director and crew just get caught up in the flow of what goes on on-set and either forgets (the usual case) or disregards the work that needs to be done after the day's shots are done. I'm not making up any excuses, just giving my own input from my experience.
The term there is to "get produced" here's how it goes:
The vendor artists complain that the capture is sub-standard and they have to do a lot of cleanup. The vendor producer is told that is an issue.
The vendor producer does not relay that message to the client's producer, usually singing praise to the raw data, and throwing their own team under the bus if needed.
Next project the vendor producer becomes a client-side producer, and the cycle repeats itself.
I have worked as a VFX Coordinator on movie sets for years, and that last part he mentioned, happens all the time with directors who know little about VFX workflow, but are too arrogant to be taught by a young artist like me. One of the producers literally kicked me out of the set because I kept warning them about what kind of information the software and artists needs. We ended up losing the job and they ended up paying twice the money to another studio for the extra rotos and clean-ups,. But I was so happy that my Supervisor backed me up and comforted me saying I was just doing my job. God I hated to work with arrogant directors and producers.
So sorry this happened w you brooo
Eff yeah to you and your supervisor! đ
Bro, help out those Adipurush makers.
They desperately need some.
@@Paul-qe1jn ikr đ
VFX coordinator might be some bussinessman rather than skillful people. In other field, we often got ade manager that dont know how a product developed. And mess everthing up and made our live harder.
Interesting topic there at the end - I feel like we need a part 2 on how they overcame the issue with the mist scattering the light everywhere
no first hand knowledge of that particular project, but as a CG artist myself I am 100% certain the data was thrown out, and they spent millions animating the characters by hand. The money wasted on these movies (for a myriad of reasons) is astounding.
@@griff7543 haha if you're right it def would have been smarter to just get a clean cap and then add in the mist as an aftereffect
It was all thrown out and they eventually stopped pumping in fog
@@griff7543 That's how you end up with stuff like Amazon shows that waste hundreds of millions only to get scrapped.
@@griff7543 u ain't wong you are 100% accurate brother....
dude this felt like a gift from god i was literally thinking about this an hour ago
You were ? you are a 3d animator ?
can you ask him to gift me some lambos
Moby Fitzsimmons? Yeah heâs been haunting my dreams also
You were thinking about optical tracking just an hour ago?
Same I'm always thinking about motion capture
YES! As an animator both in 2D and 3D its nice to have someone explain in a simple way that the mocap stage is just the basline for the work that the animators do. To be able to animate on this realistically, you need impeccable skill and eye for details. Many things in todays media also looks like its mocapped but in fact animated fully by hand. The dedication we have in this media is awesome
I assume you mean 3D puppetry, cause no one animates in 3D anymore
@@hexcodeff6624 What do you mean? Im literally sitting here animating as we speak.
@@viledeacon9995 how are you animating?
@@hexcodeff6624 with keyframes..
@@hexcodeff6624 Lol you're out of your element.
at this point Phil Edwards is just doing "VFX artists React for dummies", and I love it :D
Mocap is literally like magic. Every little feature of the actor is captured, the small gestures and twitches are all captured. And a lot of these things are imbued to the actual characters giving them more personality. Animators and VFX artists are incredible.
Another great video by Phil! I love that he's trying to explain the basics and give the due credit to VFX artists, who are a very underappreciated bunch. I've always found it annoying how all the credit is usually given to the actor, where in reality any motion capture is always a joint effort (pun intended) of the actor and the animator(s).
Super interesting!
I often see people using motion capture as a way to explain for why an animation is good, while also undercutting the animation that was done and all the hard work to get to the final result.
So I enjoyed learning about this and all the hard work that goes into into motion capture.
I audibly gasped when he said they pumped fog into the room. Those poor animators.
The final segment is something worth thinking about. I hope Vox makes a video on how truly overworked VFX artists are!
This was a great explanation of this part of the industry. As a technical artist, I appreciated your descriptions about the bones. Very clear and easy to understand for non tech people.
The Space Jam 2 story at the end is a mocap nightmare
Do you have a link to just the full interview uncut? I understand you are using only the parts to tell this story in your edit, but I'd like to watch the whole interview as he is engaging as well as very detailed in his answers.
That little snippet at the end is the story of most VFX artists. Directors have little to no experience of how the post production happens, so they do whatever they want on set..
"Why motion capture is more than actors in furry suits"
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HAPPY BIRTHDAY
I like how technology just evolves faster than your dad buying milk.
You got me thinking that i need to grab a taco on my way a la Casa.
Funny thing is, my dad is actually lactose-intolerant
Depending on the dad, that timeframe could still be indefinite.
But some of those dads never came back....
Great video: really clearly explains some of the challenges of motion capture! Things are definitely getting way better on the software and hardware front: I'm just so impressed that I have a working optical space in my house using VR lighthouse tracking.
Thanks Vox. It's time for people to understand that the animators are as responsible as the actors (if not more sometimes) for a character performance.
You can really tell how much he Loves what he does by how excited he still gets about talking about it
Big thanks for covering this! I love the quality on Vox
Just like the captured fixed footage and then providing different prospective from other angles is what has my interests in this motion capture
Another very interesting vid from Phil đđœ I didnât realize all the intricacies
Another great video from your best creator,Phil!
this is the first time seeing this but i just love it.. this is great content
I've done characters as big as the hulk and as small as rocket, alot of work is put into making the motion fit the size and personality of the character, good to see some love and explanation for the animators that have to clean up the mocap data.
Do you have anywhere I can see your work?
This video is all well and good but this guy is an amazing dancer!
in 4:32 all u have to do make function like
edge_detection()
face_detection()
point_detection()
to make sure hand or any part of body object not go through each other
ngl, I thought I would be learning a revolutionary concept that I didnât know but itâs nice to know Iâm not behind XD this will be a good video to show people what mocap is XD
wake up babe, new Phil Edwards video just dropped
This helped a lot and wasn't super confusing.
What ever you are paying phil, DOUBLE IT! I LOVE his videos
At last, a mini doc I can make people watch to get them to realise what a stupendous art form ALL animation is. CG based animation is still like building a cathedral, just like drawn and stop motion. There. Is. No. Animate. Button.
Now lets's have a whole series on this subject, a whole mini-doc on rigging, on texturing and cloth, and on how you actually animate with graph editors. Then the skill, craft and genius might be appreciated.
You should probably interview more people regarding what technologies to use. Optical and inertial tracking systems are not really competitive but rather complementary. (Well, unless you go by the marketing.) They tend to be good at different things. So you need to know what you should capture before you select technology.
Eg inertial systems don't require line of sight. So they work well when people are in close proximity (as when they are in combat, which happens occasionally in movies and games). They are also not limited to a specific capture volume, so actors don't have to worry about going "out of frame". And you can do things like capture people running outdoors at an actual track. However they don't capture absolute positions, so you get sliding and other artefacts which need to be fixed.
But in the end you have cleanup to do regardless of the capture method. It's just different post processing work.
Timeout, I need to see this capture before and after of space jam 2 he was talking about, felt like he had more to say haha
This is very useful keep up
Fun fact: Jar Jar Binks was the first motion capture character, where they tried just about every method in the video before they settled on a combination. Thatâs also why thereâs the memeâd âjar jar is the key to all thisâ because if they made him believable, others would wanna buy the services and learn how to do it themselves and theyâd have been the first.
Then shortly after it was Gollum, but those were the first two high profile that got it into the business
Perfect timing for me. I'm creating my first video game.
I remember learning animation at uni and hearing about Mocap haha everyone thinking that weâd be out of a job⊠but like if we learnt how to work with it weâd be super employable haha. Working on it now though đ
Thank you for this! Super cool video! A+++
that was very cool thank you so much !!
I tried cleaning motion capture up where someone was landing on the floor and none of the cameras could see any of the dots. Nightmare work. And that's without talking about the animation work afterwards
I have a need to see that skeletal mocap footage from the fog shoot. That has to be the most scrambled mess of joint soup. I can hear the computer screaming.
Hey there, is there a link to the full interview with the gentlemen at the end. Would love to hear the rest of the greenscreen story. Did they end up shooting with the fog on set or did they scrap it and do it in post after all.
I dont know how youd be able to greenscreen without artifact-ing if fog was introduced.
MoCap/SFX performance deserves its own award category. It's its own separate skill - Imagine LOTR with a bad Gollum or Guardians of the Galaxy with a janky Rocket.
For being harder than it looks, motion capture is highly successful.
As someone who wants to learn and get into mocap where do I need to go to get started? Programs/ volunteer work ?
I need my folks at work to watch this
I want to watch the whole interview
Amazing
FULL interview please! đ€€
The end bit is why you a vfx artist to be there. Don't add unnecessary stuff. We can add fog in post and it's way easier and cheaper than redoing or fixing that mistake.
Muito bom!!!
i have recorded motion with my motion capture suite from xens , i saved it in fbx file also in obj file and mvn file , but i cannot get it into unreal engine in my selfmade character with cc4 , do i need blender to do this ?
Nice video
y'all gotta check out 11-point tracked VRChat dancing
I really want to do this type of animation but I donât know what apps to work with,what people to work with etc.
I did some mocap and stunt work for a game back in 2003, and the thing that struck me was how hard it was to get out of the suit when you had to go poop.
The ultimate motion capture task would be to record a band playing a song, complete with motion, face capture, etc.
The space jam 2 story at the end
nice watch, i have the same one :-)
What was the first use of mocap?
We should use inverse kinematics and collision detection to prevent clipping.
Cool
The space editorial sounds like it was a nightmare. Though well compensated for living through- a nightmare none the less
The pain came back when I saw this videos name.
For those people in the MOCAP industry, if the inertial sensors you are using are 100x more accurate than what they currently use for existing motion capture suits (i.e. they use "consumer grade" inertial sensors mostly, similar to what you have in your smart phone), wouldnt that help solve the main problems of using inertial sensors mounted directly to the body?
Where should I get my mocap animations from? Any good websites?
Mixamo???
You guys should look into Codemiko. She created a whole virtual youtuber using self-made motion and face capture
She's quite interesting. She went all out on the technology. Thanks for the reference.
Hmm...
Xens seems to be capable of doing really well. For me, it looks to be enough...cheaper and more flexible then any dots based set up.
The noise has a rabbit tail for some reason đ€Ł
Interesting
Why doesn't Vox have a Discord server? It would be great if you introduced one, Vox!
đ„°
So youâre saying film making is a team sportâŠ.. 100% agree
motion capture can be finicky when doing anime backflips or spin in the air especially when your feet leaves the ground thats where the clean up crew comes in
it can be done by human? I thought that was just magic. Well done human!
Andy Serkis has minimized the work of animators in interviews, very disappointing for a man who helped pioneer the artform
If you could like do a spin and then do instant opposite spin - a kick or anything - and upload it with any animation being any superhero. It's impossible if you aren't trained. We tried to hide his flight trajectory.
I wonder how they solved that part at the end.
wow
So how dod they do it with the fog???
311,353 views, 9.6k likes, 165 comments, 10.8M subscribers. Nice!!
Is FitzSimmons a reference to AoS?
has to be :)
How much does it cost I want it for vr chat
you guys need to cover vtuber motion capture.
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Yeah that type of mocap, off course. But there are plenty more, and nothing will be more tedious than animating by hand. Cheers.
With ai and a smartphone this whole process can be done easily with any mesh and rig
I'm left handed, her laptop with numpad on the left is much helping for me 1:16
Liked the video at 0:04 after hearing Fitzsimmons
nice
DMC3 used motion capture right?
POV you use VIVE trackers for mocap and have to deal with god foresaken velcro straps
technology is so cool.
Doing post effect could be very complicated. They even have to compensate the distortion introduced by the lens they use.
The person who decide to use fog while green screen is involved clearly don't know đ©
I'm planning to buy the rokoko motion capture for a film I'm writing, if anyone have experience with it please give me some feedback if it's worth it or not. Cause it's gonna be a huge investment and i don't wanna buy a wrong product. Thanks in advance.
I'd say look into your options. There are at least three major providers of inertial suits.
Too bad you've missed out Xsens MVN stuff.
Yes! This is what I'm talking about! This tech is so equality!
Who knew Barbie vlogs are made by motion capture!? đ€Ż
Who are you interviewing in the video?-- no mention of the person commenting(?).