When the Saturn and the PlayStation met in Japan in 1994, the fighting games that sold them were judged on something no sprite game had been judged on: whether their fighters moved like people. Edge, reviewing Toh Shin Den in March 1995, put its finger on the difference. Its fighters moved with “similar fluidity” to Virtua Fighter’s, but their actions looked like “the product of talented animators rather than the stored motion patterns of real humans”. Those stored patterns were motion capture: a performer’s movement recorded as data and replayed on a 3D character. Within four years the technique had gone from a handful of arcade games to an “integral element of game design”, and the first programmers were already complaining that it did not go far enough.
Fast facts
- What it is: markers or sensors on a performer’s body, tracked in 3D, turned into joint positions or bone rotations that drive a 3D model.
- Two rival systems in 1995: magnetic (cheap, tethered by cables, “the Flock can only capture in a 16-foot hemisphere”) and optical (expensive, cable-free, “up to 240fps”).
- Early games: Virtua Fighter (Sega AM2, 1993) and Tekken (Namco, 1994) in arcades; Actua Soccer, Alien Trilogy and FIFA 96 among the home games of 1995 and 1996.
- Not rotoscoping: a rotoscoped sprite is an artist’s drawing over filmed frames. Motion capture keeps the movement as numbers, so the same move can be seen from any angle.
- The objection: captured movement cannot react. In Chris Hecker’s words, “It doesn’t tell you anything about the dynamics of the movement.”
Virtua Fighter and Tekken
Sega’s AM2 arcade team used motion capture from the start of 3D fighting games. Asked by Edge in 1994 what tools had built Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter, Yu Suzuki named SoftImage’s software on Silicon Graphics workstations for the polygons, 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 a magnetic tracker made by Ascension Technology. Ascension’s Jack Scully described how Sega used it a year later: “A couple of our customers, at Sega, for instance, use the magnetic tracker for their everyday quick and dirty work and then, when they want to do some high-speed manoeuvres like martial arts, they’ll go to an optical one.” The arcade game had about 700 motions, Suzuki said, which it combined into “an infinite variation”.
The press noticed. Edge’s review of the Saturn version in February 1995 praised its “totally convincing animation”, and its Toh Shin Den review the next month made the comparison explicit: “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.”
Namco raised the bar within months. When Edge reviewed the PlayStation version of Tekken in June 1995 it wrote that Virtua Fighter’s “motion-captured figures move with a breathtaking level of accuracy, they still fall way short of Tekken’s standards”. Edge’s motion-capture feature that September listed Virtua Fighter, Tekken and Lore Design’s Highlander as games that “employ modern motion capture techniques”, and set them against Flashback, which “used rotoscoping”. By Tekken 3 in 1997 Namco had filmed “two real martial artists”, one of them “an expert in Capoeira-based combat”, and Edge held up the fighters shadow-boxing before a bout as “a shining example” of what capture could do.
How it worked in 1995
Edge’s September 1995 feature caught the technology as it spread. Pete Meddings of Oxford Metrics, which had “already sold one of its Vicon 370 optical systems to Probe Entertainment”, said the company had “only started venturing into it in the past six months”; “Games seems to be a big driver right now,” agreed Scully. Dean LeCoe of Motion Analysis explained why hand animation fell short. You could build a convincing city street on a computer, he said, “but when you tried to walk a person through that you lost any sense of realism because, probably 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.”
Speed mattered as much as realism. LeCoe had seen “customers who are collecting over 1000 moves for a game”, and thought capture “probably the only way you could do that in a reasonable timeframe”. Meddings reckoned on “30 or 40 moves in a day”. Carl Swanick of Lore Design put the difference more modestly: a good animator might manage “one or two animations a day, while we can probably get away with 10”.
The feature laid out the two rival systems:
| Magnetic | Optical | |
|---|---|---|
| How | Receivers on the body measure their position and angle in a pulsed magnetic field from a transmitter | Cameras track reflective balls on the body; software works out each ball’s position in 3D |
| Strengths | Cheap (“probably a quarter of the price of the optical one”, said Scully); results viewable in real time | No cables; fast (“up to 240fps”); several performers at once |
| Weaknesses | Cables that “inhibit movement”; “ferrous interference” from nearby metal; a small capture area | Expensive; markers hidden from the cameras (“occlusion”) must be repaired afterwards |
Getting a skeleton out of the data was its own problem. Markers sat on the skin, not the joints, so early systems let the marker positions only loosely steer a skeleton. The newer approach, used by Acclaim, stored the performance as rotations of each bone. The accepted minimum was 23 markers: “23 without a proper ankle/toe arrangement,” said Swanick, “25 with a proper one.”
The first studios
Studios were being built. Gremlin in Sheffield was “one of the first UK software houses to establish a motion capture studio”, using Motion Analysis’s optical HiRes system, and spent $250,000 on it to record 120 moves for Actua Soccer, with the Sheffield Wednesday footballer Chris Woods among its performers. Edge visited Acclaim’s “gymnasium-sized set-up” in the basement of its offices in Glen Cove, New York: a stage “59 feet long, 43 feet wide and 24 feet high”, clad in black rubber, watched by “four black-and-white capturing cameras plus two slaves” for the director. Performers wore black suits with “from 10 to 150” sensors, each tipped with reflective tape. Acclaim’s Wes Trager explained that it had created “a new format for the skeleton and the motion data” and wanted the industry to adopt it. Frank Thomas “Big Hurt” Baseball and Alien Trilogy would be the first games to show it.
Football games made the technique a selling point. Gremlin’s producer Tony Casson called Actua Soccer “the first football game to use motion capture on such a grand scale… Over the next few years there will be a lot of motion-captured games.” Psygnosis used motion-captured players in Powersport Soccer. EA’s FIFA team 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 FIFA 96 used “a hybrid of motion capture and classical animation”, keeping some captured frames and animating the in-betweens by hand.
By 1998
Three years on, Edge found that optical capture had “emerged as the industry favourite”; Gremlin, Psygnosis and EA had their own studios, and the technique had “become an integral element of game design”. Nick Bolton of Vicon said people were now “capturing volumes of up to 11m whereas three years ago they were looking at 2m”, and that the Vicon system could take 24 cameras, enough for several actors at once. At Psygnosis’s Cheltenham studio, Angus Fieldhouse said faster cameras let “beat ‘em up moves” 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”. Bolton’s 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 an anime film. Grim Fandango’s Manny was drawn by hand throughout, for “a kind of filmic stop/go animation look”. And Chris Hecker, whom Edge introduced as a respected authority on in-game physics, made the programmer’s case against it: capture, he said, was “just a fancy way of getting an animation loop into the computer. It doesn’t tell you anything about the dynamics of the movement.” A captured character whose arm hit a wall, he said, would either carry on and look stupid or stop. Mark Cale of System 3 made the same point to Edge a few months later: capture is “pre-stored physics, not true real-world physics”. That argument leads on to physics engines and ragdoll physics.
Sources
- Edge issue 9, June 1994, pp. 6–7: Yu Suzuki’s comments in Sega’s Saturn brochure (about 700 motions); pp. 45–49, “Yu Suzuki: Sega’s driving force” (SoftImage and Flock of Birds).
- Edge issue 17, February 1995, pp. 72–75: Saturn Virtua Fighter review (“totally convincing animation”).
- Edge issue 18, March 1995, pp. 68–69: Toh Shin Den review (PlayStation), comparing its animation with Saturn Virtua Fighter’s.
- Edge issue 21, June 1995: Tekken review (PlayStation), comparing its animation with Virtua Fighter’s.
- Edge issue 24, September 1995, pp. 60–65: “Motion capture” feature (Oxford Metrics, Ascension, Motion Analysis and Lore Design; Sega’s use of magnetic and optical systems; the two systems compared; markers and bone rotations; the Virtua Fighter, Tekken, Highlander and Flashback caption; Gremlin’s studio; Acclaim’s studio in Glen Cove). The same issue’s football feature: Actua Soccer (the $250,000 studio, 120 moves, Tony Casson), Powersport Soccer and FIFA 96 (Bruce MacMillan).
- Edge issue 61, August 1998, pp. 56–65: character animation feature (Tekken 3’s martial artists; optical capture as “industry favourite”; Vicon, Psygnosis and EA Sports; Metal Gear Solid and Grim Fandango; Chris Hecker).
- Edge issue 67, January 1999: physics feature (Mark Cale of System 3).