Motion capture is everywhere in the entertainment industry. From CG characters in cinema to virtual characters in games, it has proven itself to be an incredibly effective tool for bringing imagined worlds to life.
In gaming, motion capture is used everywhere. From huge AAA titles to small indie games. But one of the types of games which has embraced it the most wholeheartedly is sports games, which now fuel the majority of their animation from the motion capture of athletes.
This article will take a look at how motion capture is integrated into sports games, translating digital avatars into the likeness of true sportspeople.
What is Motion Capture?
We’ve all seen actors wearing strange suits covered in small white balls and covered in other technology. Those are motion capture suits, and have long been a core part of motion capture.
Fundamentally, motion capture is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the process of storing an actor’s movement in a computer, so that the exact same movement can be translated onto another model—a character, monster, or anything!
Why Mocap?
Animating 3D models by hand is an incredibly difficult and time consuming endeavour. Motion capture offers a quick and relatively easy alternative to manual animation. With full scene animations being captured in hours instead of weeks.
Of course, that’s not to say motion capture is easy. It has its own challenges and requires a level of technical knowledge and equipment to achieve. However, today motion capture is cheaper and easier than it has ever been. Thanks to a wide variety of software and tools which range from expensive to free.
Today it is even possible to use AI to capture motion without expensive suits, cameras or other specialist equipment.
Types of Motion Capture
Today, there are three major types of motion capture used across the entertainment industry and for games:
- Optical Mocap – This traditional method uses cameras (traditionally with very high frame rates) to capture the movements of actors wearing specific suits covered in reflective marks (markers). Software then translates the tracker positions into a skeletal animation. Optical mocap can be combined with AI softwares to create skeletal animations without the need for tracking suits. However, traditional methods remain the most accurate.
- Inertial Mocap – A newer approach which uses suits covered in sensors (gyroscopes and accelerometers) which track the movement of the body. These can be significantly cheaper than high-quality optical mocap, but with the trade-off of being less precise. This type of mocap is common in full body tracking for VR.
The Mocap Process
The process of motion capture comes with a number of steps. While this section will not go into all the details—as that could take weeks—it will give a brief overview of what it means to motion capture for video games.
- Find your actor: In the case of sports games, professional athletes are chosen as the motion capture wants to capture real sporting actions. In other words, it doesn’t want to be staged, it wants to feel real.
- Suit up: Have your athlete wear the specialised suit with markers or sensors. For the most accurate motion capture, markers are still the top choice.
- Capture the motion: Have the athlete perform various specific movements, with cameras capturing the data and feeding it into a computer.
- Process the animation: Captured motion needs to be cleaned and processed using specialist software.
- Refine animations: While the athlete undoubtedly knows what they’re doing, when it comes to implementing the animation some things may need to be changed. Thus developers will tweak animations so that they work effectively.
- Implement: Adding the animation to sports games isn’t as simple as copy and paste. The animation will need to be made dynamic, so it responds to factors such as where the ball is, what animation played before this one, and more. Thus implementation details are required to turn the captured animation from a fixed animation into a dynamic one.
So next time you see an animation in FC or Madden—no matter how small—think about all the time that went into crafting it. Speaking of, you can buy madden nfl coins to get ahead of the competition.
Why Mocap for Sports?
Because sports games have so many variables that animations need to respond to—player position, ball position, opponent position, previous animation, physics and plenty more—procedural animation may seem like a better fit. If you were thinking this, you’d be right!
Sports games use tonnes of procedural animation to ensure that animations respond to the game state and thus look realistic. But using procedural animation doesn’t mean that you can’t use motion capture!
Developers will use motion capture animations as their raw materials—grounding all animations in the real, physical movement of athletes. Then they will take these materials and process them within the game engine to ensure that animations look great. But starting off with motion capture animations ensure that everything remains fluid and, most importantly, realistic.
What’s Next for Motion Capture in Sports Games?
Motion capture for sports games is already great—but it still has a way to go before being perfect.
So, what can we expect to see in the future?
- Facial capture: For decades now, facial animation has been one of the Achilles heels of sports games. From dead-looking eyes to robotic expressions, they simply haven’t kept up with the amazing developments in full-body animation. This makes a lot of sense seeing as you rarely see players faces until a break from the gameplay. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important. So as computers continue to get stronger, we’ll likely see better facial capture.
- Real-time Mocap Implementation: While mocap files need a lot of editing and tweaking before they can be implemented, large studios like EA are undoubtedly working on systems to make this process easier and easier. Allowing for real-time mocap to be implemented straight into the game.
- AI-powered Mocap: AI mocap is already removing some of the need for specialist equipment. In the future we may see mocap data coming from real-world football games instead of needing athletes to enter studios.
Ultimately, motion capture makes sports games look amazing, fluid and realistic. Ensuring that every kick, throw and dash is imbued with realism. So it’s clear that it’s not going anywhere: in fact, it’s only going to get better and better.