OMEGA INTERNS

Concept Art

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Digital Painting

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Seeing the awesome motion capture work in movies like “Prometheus” and “Avatar,” I wanted to find out where the journey we call “motion capture” all started. Doing some research on the web, I was surprised to find that the history of motion capture started with rotoscoping! For those of you not familiar with rotoscoping, think back to the original Max Fleisher “Superman” cartoons. This process requires the capturing of live actors onto film and tracing over the projected film; thus, replacing the live footage with an animated sequence.

Walt Disney employed the rotoscoping technique in 1937, for “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” “Cinderella” became the first feature film that was filmed in live-action prior to animation! Ralph Bakshi also employed the rotoscoping technique in his animated adaptation of “The Lord of the Rings.”

Before the 80′s, rotoscoping was a painstaking process done by hand. Rotoscope animators had to hand-draw, frame-by-frame, every sequence that employed this technique. With the surging popularity of rotoscoped animation in the ’80s, animators and scientists alike were hungry for an automated approach to speed up the process. Bob Sabiston, a veteran of the MIT Media Lab, developed a computer-assisted “interpolated rotoscoping” process which he used to make his award-winning animated short “Snack and Drink.” Richard Linklater subsequently employed Sabiston’s software in his films “Waking Life” in 2001 and “A Scanner Darkly” in 2006.

Once the rotoscoping process was streamlined with the aid of computers, it was only a matter of time before motion capture technology would be implemented to aid the 3D animation pipeline. I came across an interesting article that David Sturman wrote for Siggraph. He goes through the history of motion capture for computer animation. You can check it out here: “A Brief History of Motion Capture for Computer Animation.”

It’s really interesting to watch the behind the scenes footage of movies like “Avatar.“ Seeing these cinematographers capture not only human motion, but emotion really shows how far this technology has come.

I wonder what the future holds for this technology. How do you think motion capture technology will be used in the future?

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So I was assigned to make this blog and to update it everyday that I attend on Omega Darling. So I’ll start with a quick recap on what have happened so far.  One insinuated Thursday night I decided with my dear friend Will, to make a mocap test with one kinetc that we borrowed in the equipment center. Because for two modelling nerds that’s a lovely way to spend time! 

Firstly I hacked the kinect to work in the windows platform, using this tutorial(OpenNI+Nite): 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVYYMtH3Ll8

And then we just used the demo from Iclone:

http://www.reallusion.com/iclone/

But surely the UI from Iclone is very good, but it felt like I didn`t have as much control as much as I should because everything was a button and sometimes it`s just better if you have acess to the code or at least a way to change the variables inside the program like Maya does. 

So we changed to this mocap data recorder called Brekel:

http://www.brekel.com/?page_id=155

When we tested there was a trial version, now the kinect version is free for commercial and personal use. And the recording went very well, there as a screen that showed a rigg making a live performace. It was very useful to track where the cameras are, which is very helpful if you want to make professional mocap.  Until then we were making things without any guidance, but the results were tangible and we started at Omega Darling partially because of it. 

The first day at Omega Darling, I actually learned that they use camera tracking and matchmoving, which is taking a 2d video piece and taking 3D information in order to fit something or even doing mocap. The software used is PFtracking:  http://www.thepixelfarm.co.uk/