MOCAP Madness

I personally love to do physical performance.  It doesn't matter whether it's stress relief, self expression, exercise, filming reference, or just plain old having fun in public.  It's also a very important aspect of animation since so much gets communicated through our body movements.  One of the many things I learned on this project was Motion Capture works.  Not surprisingly, I loved suiting up and playing a character that would be in our game.
Granted most of the animation work in our game was keyed by hand, but schedule limitations and deadlines did make it necessary towards the end.  If you are going to use MOCAP then have either animators with good physical performance chops, or professional actors supply the performance being capture.  That will give the best results.  You definitely need to understand what you are performing for, and how best to approach the movements.
I put together a fun little montage of some funny moments of Firaxis Games' first shoot in Novato, CA.  2011 was a fun year, and we got to dabble in many new ways of doing things involved in both animation and game development in general.  Much of what we did was more focused and serious, but it's always great to look back at fun moments.

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