Have you impressed with insane cut scenes in the middle of a walkthrough in a game. Most probably it’s a beauty behind the concept called Motion Capture. The simple idea here is using a mechanism to gather the movement patterns digitally of an object, especially the process of capturing actor’s movement for the purpose of animating a digital character in video game or a movie. This technique has revolutionized the gaming industry by allowing game developers to create realistic animations as they needed form a person and applying to their characters in the games. In here we are about to discuss the idea behind motion capture, situation that highly used, why it is used, its importance, the technologies that existed before it and how it is reducing game development time and making the job of developers easier. Finally, we will discuss the future of motion capturing and whether there are any alternatives to this technology.
What is Motion Capture & Why?
Motion capture, also known as mocap, is a technique that uses a mechanism to gather the changes of the movement digitally of an object or an animal or person. Game developers gathered those captured movements and translate those movements into a computer-generated model. Capturing is done by specific equipment (motion capture suits, cameras and markers) and sensors that plugged to actors suite in real-time while the performance going on. This is super helpful to create realistic animations of characters and objects in the game. This way end result will be more natural and realistic than traditional animation techniques.
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Technologies that Existed Before Motion Capture to Achieve that Capability
In earlier game development process designers used traditional animation techniques to create game characters and animations such as sketch drawing frame by frame. With the time evolvement has happened, the techniques called rotoscoping (The process involves tracing over live-action footage frame by frame to create an animated version of the original footage) and stop-motion animation (manipulation of object movements by using series of photographs) came to the stage and did some improvement in the industry.
How Motion Capture Reduces Game Development Time and Making Developers’ Job Easy?
Efficiency and quickness is the key here. The prior approaches before motion capturing that discussed above, in early stages the hand-drawing each frame of the animation is really time consuming. Stop motion capturing and rotoscoping saves little time but the output is not smooth as mocap because it’s not a real-time process. Motion capture is reducing game development time and making the job of developers easier by allowing them to create realistic animations quickly and efficiently in real-time. This saves time and allows developers to focus on other aspects of game development process.
Future of Motion Capturing
In the ear of the rising artificial intelligence, it’s no doubt that mocap going to enhance with AI technologies and machine learning algorithms. With AI, the motion capture system can identify and track different body parts and movements more accurately. So Instead of using full mocap suite wearable devices will come for a play. These devices can be worn on different parts of the body, including fingers, arms, legs, and even the face. Then it will be easier for actor to perform the action and move around freely in the selected area. Moreover, these wearable devices can also capture more detailed movements, such as finger movements that were previously challenging to record accurately.
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Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are also opening new possibilities for motion capturing. Actors can get more immersive experience using VR headset. Augmented reality, on the other hand can merge real-world objects with virtual ones by creating a more seamless and interactive environment for motion capturing. Volumetric capturing (gathering the entire volume of the performer using series of cameras for a 3D representation of a person) is next stage of mocap. So the output will super detailed, accurate and realistic.
Movie and Gaming industry is not the only sections that getting advantage here. Fields like education, health care and sports achieved the significant amount of improvements with the mocap technologies in past few years. In sports, athletes can track their performance patterns and do some sharp analysis about their movements to get some valuable feedbacks in order to improve their performance. Same concept will useful in health care to monitor minor disabilities on a patient and help them recover from injuries or illnesses. In education, it can be used to create more interactive and engaging learning experiences for students.
Alternatives for Motion Capturing technology
Although it’s really cool technology to use, the motion capture can be costly, time-consuming and requires specialized equipment and expertise. As a result, alternative technologies have emerged that can be used to capture motion in different ways. Here’s the term called performance capturing comes to play, this is based on capturing an actor’s facial expressions, body movements, and voice simultaneously. Performance capture technology uses multiple cameras and sensors to record the actor’s performance and then translates it into an animated character. This technology has been used in movies such as “Avatar”, “The Polar Express” and “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
Another approach is markerless motion capture. In here actor doesn’t have to wear specialized markers or suits. Instead it has capturing mechanism that uses deep learning algorithms to track motions based on the body shape and features using cameras. Nowadays computer generated animations can used as an alternative for motion capture. With the improvement of high computer graphics and powerful hardware’s it’s possible to create highly realistic animations without doing motion capture.
As a final taught, it’s no doubt about the importance of the mocap for the industry. It will super helpful to achieve more realism and depth for the movements and expression for an animated character. But this technology is very expensive, so not every producer can use it as they want. To mitigate that problem alternative technologies are there and clearly want to mention each of these technologies has its own pros and cons. The choice of technology strictly rely on the specific application and budget.
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