MF: How did the character rigs work in terms of sharing motion-capture data and keyframe animation? What tools were developed to incorporate both these types of inputs?

AJ: As you know, I was not a big fan of motion capture when I took this job. It was always so painful to use, and, in the end, keyframing was much more liberating and usually looked better. However, here at Square they had a state-of-the-art, 16-camera capture system and some very talented programmers to write tools for us. All in all, mocap was a huge asset to this production. Working with and editing the data was made easy with a few great tools. First, we had a “mocap offset controller”; this allowed the animator to position the motion capture and animate off-sets for hands and body, and even head positions, on top of the mocap data. The animator would then bring in the IK animation model and could choose to snap the anim (low-res) model to the mocap model at any frame and set a keyframe. There were also options to snap to mocap position on ones, twos, threes, tens — whatever frame increment you wanted. You could use the mocap on twos for half of the shot and then keyframe the second half for a desired performance. It was really quite seamless and easy to use. The fact that most people think that Final Fantasy was 100% motion capture really says a lot about our animation team. People can’t tell which scenes were keyframed.

MF: What does the future hold for digital characters, and what types of advancements need to be made in order to make the process of creating characters more intuitive?

AJ: I believe that people will keep trying for the Holy Grail of a photoreal digital human. However, I think that the only way to truly achieve it is to motion capture the body and the face. Then it is a captured performance transposed onto a CG body. Capturing all of the subtleties of human emotion is far easier than keyframing it. It’s funny how computers get faster and faster, but we just keep throwing more and more calculations at them. On the “look” side of things, global illumination is going to greatly increase the photoreal look of characters. As soon as it becomes cost-effective to render an entire movie with global illumination, you’ll see some pretty amazing stuff…

MF: Do you have any other tips or tricks for our readers?

AJ: Keep your animation models light and fast. If you can interactively scrub your wire-frame model in realtime, your animation will benefit from this speed. Leave the heavy models for render time. When animating the eyes of your character, be sure to use a world aim constraint so that when the head and body move around, the eyes stay fixed on whatever they are looking at. Also, when animating your eye target, keep the animation curves linear and remember that the eyes move very fast from target to target — in most cases in two to three frames.

MF: Thanks, Andy.

AJ: You’re welcome.

To learn more about other topics of interest to animators, check out Inspired 3D Character Setup by Michael Ford and Alan Lehman, series edited by Kyle Clark and Michael Ford. Boston, MAJ: Premier Press, 2002. 268 pages with illustrations. ISBN: 1-931841-51-9 ($59.99). Read more about all four titles in the Inspired series and check back to VFXWorld frequently to read new excerpts.

Author Alan Lehman (left), author and series editor Mike Ford (center), series editor Kyle Clark (right).

Author Alan Lehman, an alumnus of the Architecture School at Pratt Institute, is currently a technical animator at Sony Pictures Imageworks, as well as a directed studies advisor in the Animation Studies Program at USC’s School of Cinema-Television.

Michael Ford, series editor, is a senior technical animator at Sony Pictures Imageworks and co-founder of Animation Foundation. A graduate of UCLA’s School of Design, he has since worked on numerous feature and commercial projects at ILM, Centropolis FX and Digital Magic. He has lectured at the UCLA School of Design, USC, DeAnza College and San Francisco Academy of Art College.

Series editor Kyle Clark is a lead animator at Microsoft’s Digital Anvil Studios and co-founder of Animation Foundation. He majored in film, video and computer animation at USC and has since worked on a number of feature, commercial and game projects. He has also taught at various schools, including San Francisco Academy of Art College, San Francisco State University, UCLA School of Design and Texas A&M University.