Motion Capture -Tamarrion

A few weeks ago we had a motion capture shoot, this was necessary as we are switching to PC controls and needed new animations for Tamarrion to fit the new movement system and to record animations for the new boss that I am working on.

We had some problems setting up and our first attempt failed as something went wrong with the files that did not know where to search for the markerset. For our second attempt we got some help and after some additional problems we did manage to get it up and running.

Last time that we had a shoot we had two male actors, it meant unfortunately that the run animation could not be used and had to be hand made. This time we knew that we needed a female actress and with no one else available to fill the part it had to be me dressing up in the silly suit and doing the acting.



There were some problems with that though, one being that I am not a professional actress or have any real knowledge of how to wield a sword, and, frankly, I am about as agile as a bathtub. But the biggest issue was that I was unable to see myself what we were recording. I am the one responsible for how the animations are supposed to look and the one who will be working with them later and not seeing what the takes looked like made that impossible for me to judge.

Instead I had to rely on my fellow artist, our hired in mocap operator and our designer, who all had opinions. The biggest problem with that was the people who have no experience in working with animations telling me to move my arms more, which meant that when I was working on the animations I had to reduce the arm movement significantly as it looked far too busy.

We did show the entire shoot on my art stream and had quite a few people watching and asking questions. This also means that the entire shoot is now available to be seen on my youtube channel, here is one part of it.

It was a three hour workout and I was quite sore the day after, but we did have a lot of fun. One thing that we could improve on is planning the animations better in advance. I got a tip recently of doing thumbnails for all our animations and I think that might help us knowing better how they should look and work. We did have a general idea of what we wanted but we could probably save us some time by doing this in the future.