Motion Capture
Recording reality
Motion capture records a performer's movement as data for a 3D character; Sega AM2 used a magnetic system on Virtua Fighter by 1994, Acclaim, Gremlin and Psygnosis built optical studios in 1995, and by 1998 it was standard practice and already being argued against.
Motion capture records a performer’s movement as data and replays it on a 3D character. Games took it up as soon as they had polygon characters to move: Sega’s AM2 was using a magnetic system on Virtua Fighter by 1994, Edge ran a five-page survey of the technology in September 1995 as Acclaim, Gremlin and Psygnosis built studios, and by 1998 optical capture was “an integral element of game design” — and already being argued against by the physics programmers.
Fast facts
- Earliest game use held here: Virtua Fighter (Sega AM2, 1993), per Yu Suzuki in 1994: “We’ve always also used… Flock Of Birds motion capture system for the animation”.
- Two technologies in 1995: magnetic (cheap, tethered, “the Flock can only capture in a 16-foot hemisphere”) and optical (expensive, tetherless, “up to 240fps”), with “23 markers… the minimum”.
- First UK studios: Gremlin (Sheffield, Motion Analysis HiRes) for Actua Soccer; Acclaim’s Glen Cove stage was 59 × 43 × 24 feet.
- The counter-argument: Konami threw away its Metal Gear Solid capture data for keyframes; Chris Hecker: “Motion capture sucks.”
Virtua Fighter
Asked by Edge in 1994 what AM2 used to build Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racing, Yu Suzuki listed SoftImage on Silicon Graphics for the models and added: “We’ve always also used SoftImage’s Flock Of Birds motion capture system for the animation in Virtua Fighters.” (Flock of Birds was Ascension’s magnetic system; SoftImage supplied the software that drove it.) When the Saturn version arrived, Edge thought animation was where it “does have the edge”: “the motion-captured antics of VF’s combatants are uncannily authentic — especially Lau’s high jump onto his downed opponent’s chest, which is just plain spooky.” By 1995 Edge was listing Virtua Fighter, Tekken and Lore Design’s Highlander together as games that “employ modern motion capture techniques”, against Flashback, which had used rotoscoping.
The 1995 survey
Edge’s September 1995 feature caught the technology in its first year in games. The vendors were surprised: Oxford Metrics had “only started venturing into it in the past six months” and sold a Vicon 370 to Probe; Ascension’s Jack Scully agreed “games seems to be a big driver right now”. Motion Analysis’s Dean LeCoe explained why keyframing had failed — “deep in our primitive brain, we can watch a person walk from a great distance and tell instinctively whether they’re young or old, healthy or unhealthy” — and why capture was winning: customers were “collecting over 1000 moves for a game”, and “motion capture is probably the only way you could do that in a reasonable timeframe”. Oxford Metrics reckoned “30 or 40 moves in a day”.
The feature laid out the two rival systems. Magnetic capture was “relatively cheap, but the wires inhibit movement”, suffered “ferrous interference” from any nearby metal, and Ascension’s Flock “can only capture in a 16-foot hemisphere”. Optical systems tracked reflective markers with several cameras: expensive, prone to occlusion, but tetherless, fast (“up to 240fps”) and able to capture more than one performer. Twenty-three markers was “the minimum needed to accurately capture human motion”.
Studios were being built. Gremlin in Sheffield was “one of the first UK software houses to establish a motion capture studio”, and had captured Sheffield Wednesday’s Chris Woods for Actua Soccer. Edge visited Acclaim’s “gymnasium-sized set-up” in Glen Cove, New York: a stage “59 feet long, 43 feet wide and 24 feet high”, four capture cameras plus two for the director, performers in black suits with “from 10 to 150” reflective sensors, and a proprietary bone-rotation format that Wes Trager hoped “the industry adopt”. Its first products were Frank Thomas “Big Hurt” Baseball and Alien Trilogy.
Sports games
Football was the first genre to make capture a selling point. Gremlin’s Tony Casson called Actua Soccer “the first football game to use motion capture on such a grand scale… everyone else will be playing catch-up. Over the next few years there will be a lot of motion-captured games.” EA’s FIFA 96 was more cautious: producer Bruce MacMillan explained that “the more motion you capture, the more lush the visuals but the slower the gameplay experience”, so EA used “a hybrid of motion capture and classical animation”, keeping some captured frames and hand-drawing the in-betweens.
By 1998
Three years on, Edge found optical capture had “emerged as the industry favourite”, with Gremlin, Psygnosis and EA running their own studios. Vicon’s Nick Bolton said capture volumes had grown from 2 m to 11 m and its system could take 24 cameras; Psygnosis’s Cheltenham studio captured at 120 samples a second (printed as “120MHz”) so that “beat ‘em up moves” could be “caught with more precision than ever before”. EA Sports’ Dave Warfield remembered the early days, when “you had to wait days, even weeks to see if a move worked”. The stated goal was “markerless, realtime capture, so you can be Lara”.
The same feature carried the dissent. Konami “threw away all of its motion capture data for the characters in Metal Gear Solid and went back to using key-frame animation” to get the look of anime; Grim Fandango’s Manny was hand-animated for a stop-motion feel. And Chris Hecker made the physics programmer’s case: “Motion capture sucks. It’s just a fancy way of getting an animation loop into the computer. It doesn’t tell you anything about the dynamics of the movement.” Mark Cale of System 3 put the same point more politely a few months later — capture is “pre-stored physics, not true real-world physics”. That argument runs on into ragdoll physics.