So I thought I’d post real quick about some of the animation work I did last week.

The animation on all of the characters in the game will come from a mix of hand-animation and motion capture. Motion capture being the kind of animation data you get when you literally take a recording of real humans doing particular motions.

There are a number of indie-affordable motion capture solutions out there now. I’ve got the optitrack one (shown in the video above) and its pretty good, but can be a pain to setup and needs a fairly big space. Luckily I can borrow one of the labs where I work so can sometimes get space to play with it. But marker based solutions (you have probably seen them, where your motion capture actor wears the blue cat-suit and the while dots) have some pretty issues unless you can spring for a very expensive setup. I’m planning to have a look at IPISoft’s video based solution, which basically takes the input of 4 video cameras that are frame synchronized and does a shape fitting algorithm on them to create a “markerless” motion capture. Still not 100% ideal, not realtime, but perhaps useful enough to be worth a try.

Of course there are plenty of places that sell motion capture. Plus a number of free resources, the largest being the Carnegie Mellon University’s motion capture database. Here’s an example of that CMU data being played back on the new box guy prototype agent.

There is still a bit of footskate on his playback, but thats more of an artifact than anything “wrong”. Easy to fix but kind of pointless right now.

So, at some point I’ll get round to showing off the animation blend-tree and how that works for character locomotion. Plus show off some nicer clips of social motions (waving, hugging, chatting etc). For now the main thing is to work out some more of the squad control interface, which is coming along slowly.