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Motion capture?

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Motion capture?

I'm just wondering what everyones opinion on motion capture for animated movies is.

My personal opinion:

It looks VERY stiff when done without the animators altering it at all like in Polar Express and Final Fantasy and the upcoming Monster House.
In Polar Express the animators literally were told to TRACE (in a sense ;) ) the actions of the actors DIRECTLY as they were done without exaggerating or altering. If you do it that way why make it animated at all? Why not shoot a live action film?

However, it can look very GOOD when the movements are altered and exageratted by the animators like in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies for Gollum and Jackson's upcoming movie King Kong.

In conclusion, my opinion is that it's okay to use mo-cap or even rotoscoping on paper for reference but not as a CRUTCH like in Polar Express or the Banski's Lord of the Rings.

James :cool:

So is everyone here pretty much opposed to mocap?

I've always seen it as just another tool. I loved Serkis' work on Gollum and especially Kong, and I gotta say that of being an animator requires one to be an actor, well, sometimes actors are more qualified than animators to get the job done.

That's not to say that mocap should replace animators- much to the contrary. Like all of WETA's work, animators put the feeling and emotion into the character when the mocap is insufficient or technically limited. Or when you need a human face to emote through a Gorilla's facial anatomy.

And since it's not optical info, but spatial info, it's a totally streamlined option to keyframing for 3-D, so long as the actor is talented.

I guess I don't see why there should be this constant battle between animators (artists) and mocappers (techies,) when ultimately the performance (actor) is the most important thing. Is it about creative control over the performance?

animation makes something not real appeaer real and alive.

mocap makes something not real move.

"who wouldn't want to make stuff for me? I'm awesome." -Bloo

Jeez, Erik, how do you ever expect anyone to get what it is you have to say with ginormous posts like that? ;)

Sorry for the confusion.

It is bad.

Better?

Aloha,
the Ape

...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."

Too long a read. I got bored. What's the gist of what you just said?

:D

Face Painting

Has any one seen the current Schwab commercial? It has an actor in close up taking about how Schwab has solved his problems. I am trying to find some contructive comments on how this commercial could be improved but still be a close up of the actors painted face.

Jeez, Erik, how do you ever expect anyone to get what it is you have to say with ginormous posts like that? ;)

There is actually a nice gray area between "hammy" (comedic or theatric) acting and robotic acting. It doesn't have to be one or the other.

For the realistic look and drama of a movie like Polar Express, fluid and believable acting is required.
When you take kids to the mall, their faces light up; so to take them on an adventure like the Polar Express and get those blank stares is quite unbelievable.

Didn't Max Fleischer invent rotoscoping some time in the 30s? I believe it's been much more widely used throughout the history of animation than is generally assumed. I know they did a lot of it in Fantasia, and I'm guessing they used it in Fleischer's Superman cartoons.

Yeah, you have to stylize it. It's more like the construction lines than it is like the finished drawing. I do believe that ultimately, a human hand should be responsible for the end result. But it seems more likely that you'd come up with something organic if you start out with an actor in a suit than if you start out with a bunch of numbers and theoretical curves inside of a computer.

rotoscope for 2d and motion cap for 3d is like photoshop lens flare for everything lol,it only works when ya use it right,and its very rare that it works.

i'm talking about in this day and age though,not classic movies,back then no one had a clue heh.

i hate rotoscope personally,taking a cam corder and recording what u want and using its as a REFERENCE is all good,but blatently tracing just i dunno,what the point of it being animated? lol.

Some people say the murder animated scenes in kill bill wher rotoscoped,but the studio say they weren't,i can't even tell,either they are really great animators or successfull rotoscopers.

I think motion capture would be an interesting tool if it was used in a more inspired direction. The idea at the moment seems to be very similar to rotoscope in that it's something you do if you want realism of motion. That may be true, but I think it's a restrictive mindset. It's like using a photoshop filter to turn a photograph into a "painting".

What I would like to see is what could be done if mo-cap were used perhaps by talented puppeteers for stylised characters. Another thing that would make it more interesting would be reproducing motion through characters that don't have the standard human body proportions. That's usually one of the big givaways of rotoscope: if you merely trace the photostat, there's no getting away from the standard human proportions. At Disney they would often use rotoscope as a starting point, reference only. Snow White is not the standard human proportions, and could not be traced. Later referenced characters, like Cruella DeVille are interesting to look at because their features are exadurated and caricatured.

I guarentee you that with the right approach and the right designs, motion-capture could be really cool. I don't even think it would need to be hand-tweaked by animators. You could develop a style where audiences would forgive the slight clumsiness of movement, in the same way that stop-motion has it's own quality of movement, and how Anime isn't generally as fluid in it's movement as the 40s Hollywood style. Every art form has it's supposed drawbacks, but on the right project and in the right hands, they can become assets.

Really? We're going to have this discussion again? So soon?
There's so much we could be talking about, but most of you seem to raise the same topics over and over and over again. :o

Rotoscoping and mo-cap are like any artistic technique.
Sometimes they are done well. Most of the time they aren't.

Making a realistic-looking animated film is particularly dangerous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley
If you want to create realistic-looking CGI human characters that move in a believable manner, mo-cap is essential; but then you have to go all the way and pay excruciating attention to detail, by cleaning up the facial animation: the eyes, the brow, the nose, and lips.
That's all; case closed; wow, what a revelation; etc.

lol sorry I didn't know there was another topic on this.
I should have searched I guess :(

James :cool:

I should just be used to the same topics popping up by now.

Maybe I'll resurrect my Scanner Darkly thread. That type of rotoscoping hasn't been discussed in a while.

http://forums.awn.com/showthread.php?t=228

Hey Harvey, if the thread bores you ignore it. If there are more worthy topics going undiscussed, then by all means, bring them up in your own thread.

I will respond to whichever threads I wish to. :rolleyes:
I had something to say on the subject, so I said it.

Thanks Harvey. Hope you don't mind if I repost the link where I think it could go to some good use. One of the more entertaining illustrations I've seen on the Wikipedia when taken out of context haha

As long as the topic stays alive....so to speak......I'd be interested to see where the 'creepiness' factor lies if we did motion-capture zombies.

One of the more entertaining illustrations I've seen on the Wikipedia when taken out of context haha

Heh, good point. :)

"Uncanny" Robots

I was reading some more about the "The Uncanny Valley" and ran across these images:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/0610_050610_robot.html
http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2005/0613/nedo0153.mov
... Mrs. Roboto, I think.

3D in 3D

This just came out today about Polar Express:
http://www.comingsoon.net/news/topnews.php?id=12416
Apparantly, it's amazing to see in IMAX.

Fixing Mo-cap

Here's a thorough analysis of how the flaws in Polar Express could have been fixed:
http://wardomatic.blogspot.com/2004/12/polar-express-virtual-train-wreck_18.html

i think Linklater is doing some interesting stuff with his rotoscopy. i think the software he is using isnt even available yet officially and its supposed to be a good step forward.

ive seen some cool rotoscoped shit.

Those chopped Polar Express stills on Ward's site are actually really reasonable.

The one thing that's really missing from the robot is some way for the body parts to relate to one another, instead of moving as a whole. Counteraction, muscular compensation, use of force, whatever you'd like to call it. Pretty natural color job overall, though.

I remember seeing those stills on Ward's site when the film came out. Basically he's predjudiced against downward slanting eyebrows.

It's a side topic, but I don't really like the Japanese approach to robotics. They're quite practical about it, and they seem to be well ahead of the game, but the movement all seems so measured and controlled. I find the stuff coming out of MIT a lot more exciting. They've managed to create a much looser quality of movement with joints that have bounce and tension.

I think the reality is he didn't vary up the examples, or more likely the problems they had were in depicting emotions that are best specified with expressions as he Photoshopped them. The difference is clear in before and after in how well they read when he supplies the story context.

It's never a good idea to keep your character or rig in a default, and those stills don't show a strong enough deviation from a "default" look to read as one specific emotion. It's confusing. Maybe it's just that the filmmakers were prejudiced against using eyebrows in their most effective and appropriate manner.

As they say, practice makes better. ;)

I liked the way Triplettes of Bellvville more or less did keep their characters in a default expression. They didn't get caried away with the sort of hammy acting that is rife in animation. I'm not saying it has to be this way all the time, but it made for a nice change.

There is such a thing as a stylized default. If you had to be a deadpan-expression stodgy old guy, unflinching...that doesn't have a lot of movement to it, but it's not like model-sheet-minus-personality ....

I think it's a bigger problem with 3D, given the nature of construction and setup for use

I think the character actors in old Hollywood must have had a kind of stylized default approach. I like the old acting portfolios where they'd have a scowling pic with "anger" printed under it. I know in comic books, they've always given each character a limited number of facial expressions so they'd be easily identifiable.

I get a lot of mileage out of old black and white movies. The dry rot of naturalism hadn't really set in, yet. The thugs in film noirs are a good example. Neville Brand's face in the original DOA is a menagerie of sadistic glee. To a degree, it was B-movie hamming, but there was a subtlety, too. I tend to think of it as repressed expressionism.

Horror films are another great example. I have studied John Agar's change of expression when he gets possessed in Brain From Planet Arous frame by frame, and it's pretty rich. He very smoothly goes from "My god, what's happening to me?!" to "I am an omnipotent alien and MUST find earth women with conical brassieres immediately!" It's a great piece of acting that has nothing to do with real life.

In general, I think it's important to stay away for what passes for "naturalism" in current Hollywood movies. Cartoons (animated and comic books) might be the last gasp of stylized acting. In modern live action, it automatically becomes a comedy when they 'over-act'.

Well said sir, on all accounts.

I'm not against 'hammy' acting at all, in fact quite the contrary. I just grow weary of the kind of third-generation imitations and recycled eyebrow gymnastics that have made much of modern animation all generic and similar.

I didn't like the way that site was advocating the sort of upturned eyebrow sympathetic approach that's overused in the first place. There is such a thing as challenging an audience. I prefer both the default, relatively expressionless approach and the Spumco every-expression-a-fresh-one approach. These are both more interesting than using stock expressions. In the first you can have a sort of poker-face, where the audience can be intrigued, and wonder what's going through the character's mind, and in the second, you show those thoughts vividly and in an entertaining fashion.

I'm just wondering what everyones opinion on motion capture for animated movies is.

It's bad.

Aloha,
the Ape

...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."