Motion capturing hurting 3d animation?

[meowoot]

I just watched Appleseed and I noticed that although the visuals were great, the actual animation seemed kind of unnatural at times. I watched the special features and apparently they used motion capture for everything. It was "cleaned up" by normal animators by adding expressions that the motion capture didn't pick up but that was about it.

I noticed this in Beowulf too. It wasn't as obvious but it was still there.
Is it a problem with the actual motion capture itself?
The unnatural movement seems to be pretty absent from 100% animation movies.

Is it a problem with the mo-cap actors not exaggerating their movements slightly like actual animators do? Is it a problem with the actual motion capture? Is it both? Am I just being picky?

[HunterKiller_]

Appleseed didn't use entirely motion cap.

This is actually quite a large topic. It's called the 'uncanny valley' effect, look it up.

[Justin.]

I say this only from observation, not from experience, but good animators make good animation, regardless if they start with a mocap base or not. It's like matte-painting. If you can't paint, it is more than likely you will not do good matte paintings.

[aesir]

mocap has had some significant disadvantages, but frankly, its getting better and better tech wise. Beowolf is the latest tech and Im sure it will continue to improve. For large studios doing realistic animations, Im sure it will become the norm.

However, not everyone can afford the whole setup required for motion capture. It might take a bit for it to be cheap enough for smaller operations.

Still most animation has pretty wild unrealistic motion that an actor cant pull off, so keyframing still has a long ways to go until its dead.

[dose]

I agree with HunterKiller- what you are reacting to in these might be the uncanny valley effect.

[FlipMcgee]

Usually, mocap actors are just wearing spandex with the sensors when recording there movements. But if you just apply their actions on say a bulky and heavy looking cg armor or beefed up hulky character and the mocappers fail to compensate for that then it's likely you'll see unrealistic motions.


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[Zilant]

As near as I can figure it.

I imagine our artistic forefathers faced a similar issue, whole droves of artists principally made their money from painting portraits. And along comes the camera...

Instead of artistic apocalypse it ushered in an age of abstraction, exploration, and imagination.

I see something similar happening with motion capture.
Afterall, it's not like you can motion capture a Dragon.

In my opinion: (and I want to stress that, because mocap is so hot button)
The likes of Zemeckis work is interesting, and I'm glad he's pushing the technology, because it does have uses outside film (ex: videogames). But the way he applies it as much novelty in the sense of new, as it is novelty in the sense of trinket. If mocap is fundamentally limited, to the forms of existing creatures, most reliably humans. Why futz around with Mocap and CGI when it's cheaper to just let Actors Act?

Beowulf was CGI for CGI sake.
And while I think Mocap has a future as a powerful tool for an animator, I think these all-Mocap titles will get old as novelties tend to do.

[FlipMcgee]

Why futz around with Mocap and CGI when it's cheaper to just let Actors Act?

What if the director or writer wants to show the actor receive an injury?

What if the star actor who has strict insurance requirements need to jump from a tall crane and land on both feet on hard concrete 'cuz his name is James Bond? Or an actor is paralyzed from the waist down but his character in the script needs to move and fight upright like a healthy person?

What if the voice actress who's likeness is also the basis of the sexy character in the movie but is also pregnant during the production part of the schedule?

[Zilant]

We've been doing the first two for ages before Mocap was invented.
Compositing packages have gotten the science down to "stupidly easy" at this point.

The second two are kind of stretching it, don't you think?

I can't even think of an Actor like that, that isn't a Voice Actor. When we get to Voice Actor territory we're probably getting into the kind of animation that's key-framed to be "cartoon animation" anyway. It's probably very horrible that we don't have more physically Handicapped individuals in the spotlight, but, nobody ever said Hollywood had to be equal opportunity. (lord knows, it's sexist and racist, I suppose anti-handicap is wholly appropriate.)

There aren't many Actresses who work while they're pregnant, and it has very little to do with the Studio worrying she'll look fat.

[FlipMcgee]

We've been doing the first two for ages before

The second two are kind of stretching it, don't you think?


:yum:

Ricardo Montalban, paralyzed from the waist down, but his character in Spy Kids 3 is walking/ talking upright.

Angelina Jolie, 3 months pregnant during her two and half day shoot for Beowulf.

Point is, mocap and cgi are just tools and techniques to help film makers achieve their goals. If you're already paying your lead actors bagillions of dollars, hiring a mocap studio to record the body or stunt double motions would look just like grocery money in comparison.

I'm not expecting a Shakespeare themed movie to have Jet Li battling his evil twin. But if I'm gonna watch a Stallone action movie I don't care if he's acting or not, I wanna see guys getting hurt.

[Zilant]

Jolie's more exception than rule. (in well, alot of things really).
For the most part, do you really see pregnant actresses jumping at the chance to do Mo-cap work? Or work - period?

Spy kids uses Live actors and Compositing as well. It's not really in the ostentatious strain of all-Mocapping that's really my major beef here. I already acknowledged Mocap is a powerful tool. And Spy Kids 3d seems like appropriate application to me. (Even if it's not a terribly good movie.)


I'm not expecting a Shakespeare themed movie to have Jet Li battling his evil twin. But if I'm gonna watch a Stallone action movie I don't care if he's acting or not, I wanna see guys getting hurt.

That's a fair enough point.

[Sept13]

One word- Gollum.

[FlipMcgee]

Two good examples of perfect use of mocap but with opposite results.

Like what Sept13 has mentioned, Lord of the Rings. But not just Gollum. Remember the hordes? Epic battle scenes? A lot of those were possible because of this software called Massive.

Second example is Final Fantasy The Movie. Perfect cg but horrible script.

[Jasonwclark]

The Uncanny Valley (brief overview from the wiki)

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The "valley" in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot's lifelikeness. It was introduced by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, and has been linked to Ernst Jentsch's concept of "the uncanny" identified in a 1906 essay, "On the Psychology of the Uncanny." Jentsch's conception is famously elaborated upon by Sigmund Freud in a 1919 essay, simply entitled "The Uncanny" ("Das Unheimliche"). A similar problem exists in realistic 3D computer animation, such as with the film The Polar Express.

Mori's hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.

This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a "barely-human" and "fully human" entity is called the uncanny valley. The name captures the idea that a robot which is "almost human" will seem overly "strange" to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathetic response required for productive human-robot interaction.

The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that, if an entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is "almost human", then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of "strangeness" in the human viewer. In other words, a robot stuck inside the uncanny valley is no longer being judged by the standards of a robot doing a good job at pretending to be human, but is instead being judged by the standards of a human doing a terrible job at acting like a normal person. Another possibility is that affected individuals and corpses exhibit many visual anomalies similar to the ones seen in humanoid robots and so elicit the same alarm and revulsion. The reaction may become worse with robots since there is no overt reason for it to occur, whereas distaste for the sight of a corpse is a feeling easy to understand.

It is possible that the "uncanny valley" effect evolved as a means of instinctively identifying and ostracizing human individuals carrying illnesses or mental problems that might render interaction (specifically breeding and long-term care) detrimental to the group



You can see variations of this hypothesis at work with still images too. Take our reaction to Marvin the Martian vs. Steve Neill's Alien:

Throw a set of simple eyes on blacked a out face, and you wind up a loveable little alien invader... but black out the eyes on a humanoid looking face and it's about as creepy a thing as you can imagine, even with the smile.

[tomwaits4noman]

Disney used rotoscoping for the character of Snow White, and it did not signal an end for traditional animation,

There will always be studios that use motion capture techniques some use it well most use it horribly as they fail to understand one very important point, you still need to use the principles of animation....