MAYGER3D

Motion capture as a whole is an incredibly powerful tool for animators, but it is often associated with costly rigs and professional experience. As a student, this technology felt inaccessible to me—or so I thought.

When I was in college, I decided to build and composite a 3D character into a short film I had to produce. Having limited time, practical animation was not an option for me, but wanting to bolster my 3D portfolio, I found a solution: VR equipment. At the time, I had an HTC Vive VR headset and five body trackers. With lighthouse sensors on either side of the room I was in, the tracking quality was surprisingly good for consumer-grade gear, and since I already had the kit, there were no overhead costs. The headset also included an eye and face tracker, which I did not require, but was a nice addition to have if needed. I found a piece of software called Mocap Fusion, free on Steam, and perfect for what I was trying to do. My plan was to strap myself with trackers and, while playing the vocal lines I had recorded, act out and drive my movement onto an armature, which I could then apply my character to and composite into my scene. While fairly rudimentary, the software used a decent inverse kinematics system to interpret joint movements. As the trackers I had were on my head, hands, waist, and feet, it output surprisingly accurate results. Considering I was working on a two-person, unfunded student film, this software felt like magic at the time.

After matching my camera angles, matching lighting, and doing a fair amount of fairly basic compositing, I had an output that looked stylistically driven and, to someone not familiar with the process, resembled convincing animation. Professional motion capture setups with multiple cameras and sensors can easily cost tens of thousands of pounds, and even renting this equipment for a few days is still a significant investment for smaller indie companies that need access to this technology. More accessible tools like these, which allow consumer-grade equipment to emulate aspects of a professional setup, are extremely valuable and push the boundaries of what smaller teams can achieve. If I was able to achieve workable motion capture alone in a shed as an experiment, an indie company with more advanced knowledge and dedicated people to clean the data could easily speed up their animation workflows to efficient and reliable levels. I now know that, in a pinch, for my own projects or even small-scale productions, I can produce motion capture relatively easily. I would suggest that if you have access to the equipment, it is absolutely worth experimenting with yourself.