Now at H1Z1 they are providing insights into the motion capture process intended to refine the animations.
At the end of last year, there was news from what was then SOE (now: DGC) that they had spent two days in Sony’s huge motion capture studio, where many blockbuster titles are recorded, and had captured all the “new” animations there. Previously, they had used different methods. In this XXL setup, data for movement sequences can be collected incredibly quickly; they gathered the necessary sequences for 600 actions in those two days. This action can now be admired in a video.
Stuntman Christopher Robbins is a former college football player who didn’t quite make the jump to the pros, as he describes. To make a living, he chose a career as a motion capture stuntman and is successful and in demand there. He has recorded animations for The Last of Us, numerous other top titles, and returned to his football roots for the Madden franchise.
In the dev talk, the stuntman performs various stunts and movements in a strange outfit full of sensors. Every movement is precisely measured here and later serves as a template for the final animations in the game. If an animator had to fabricate all this from memory, it would be significantly more labor-intensive.
But the motion capture method is also time-consuming and strenuous; the worst, says Robbins, are the movements in a squat. If you do that for a day, moving the next day doesn’t go too well. The elaborate combat and falling scenes are also exhausting but incredibly fun.
In his experience, the gaming industry has moved away from specialists in recent years and oriented more towards athletic “normies” who are not highly trained, and whose movements are decent, but not as refined and elegant as, for instance, a martial arts professional. A typical action-hero style with more power than finesse. That’s also the look that the developers of H1Z1 want.
The motion capture animations are set to gradually replace the current, somewhat clunky placeholder animations. This is likely to ensure that H1Z1 visually upgrades in such a way that it no longer offers too much attack surface on the front. At the start of early access, there was quite a bit of criticism to be heard.
