Motion and facial motion capture for

video games

By David Kovalenko

Where it began:■ Rise of the Robots was the first to use motion

capture technology in gaming to create fluid, real movement in characters. It used CGI sprites rather than pixel art for them, and the look of the game was well ahead of other games released around 1994. It was released on home consoles, PC and also had an arcade version. However the game did not do so well critically, the game was said to be ‘too easy’ and it was said that the developers ‘sacrificed gameplay for graphics’

Motion Capture ■ Motion Capture is the process of recording the

movement of people, animals or objects. It is a way to capture realistic movements to a digital 3D space. When the capture is as detailed to the face and fingers it is commonly known as performance capture. The best example of developers that do performance capture are Quantic Dream who most recent game was Beyond Two Souls which stared big name actors like Ellen Page and Willem Defoe.

Motion/Performance Capture in Modern Games ■ Most new big triple A games now use motion

capture to it’s limits, the main reason for this is so that they can have realistic Hollywood acting in cut scenes. However most motion capture is used for gameplay so that it you can see realistic movements seamlessly and not just in cutscenes.

■ What they try to do in games now is to make the cutscenes and the gameplay to be almost almost seamless with no loading screens intended however this is not cheap and harder to do with the last generation of consoles (PS3 & XBOX 360)

Facial Capture in L.A NoireFacial capture is all about the performance but not as you might think. For example L.A Noire was one of the first games to utilize this to the max however they had the actors doing their lines twice. This was because they had the actors be in a room surrounded by the most advanced cameras to date. Rockstar did not use dots on faces to track they just used the recordings of the actors that was taken from every possible angle. They wanted real authentic emotion because the aim of the game is to be a detective and read people's emotions.

Price of Motion Capture When you look at the price for motion capture you

understand why not all games have it as it is very expensive for example Beyond Two Souls cost 28M to make. This is a lot considering most games usually cost around 10M. The problem with using motion capture technology is that you need to know whether or not the game you are developing will make a lot of money back. Beyond Two Souls sold 1.5M by christmas of 2013 and it’s release date was on October 2013. This is surprising considering Ellen Page starred in the game which is a big marketing ploy.

Performance as Reference Some games however use motion capture as reference and for voice acting, they record the performances and give the footage to the animators. The animators would have to see the performances over and over again and animate the faces to fit the acting style. A good example of a game that did this was THE LAST OF US; the game used top quality actors although the faces were completely different and each emotion and facial movement had been created from scratch. THE LAST OF US won over 20 Game of the year Awards and some BAFTA awards. Although this is a cheaper way of using motion capture the process can be long depending on the studio.

The Main Problem The biggest problem with using advanced motion capture is

the amount of memory it uses, for example L.A Noire was released on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3; and required 3 discs for the Xbox however because the PS3 discs are Blu Rays they hold 5 times more memory space. The newly released Infamous Second Son used very advanced motion capture which had almost ‘uncanny valley’ feel to them and they gameplay and cutscenes transitioned almost seamlessly. This is mainly due to the game being on the PlayStation 4 which can handle a lot of data and has 8GB of RAM.

Sources

www.wikipedia.com

www.ign.com

http://www.develop-online.net/tools-and-tech/motion-capture-moving-with-the-times/0117523

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131827/planning_and_directing_motion_.php