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Animation & VFX · MS elective · 3 credit hours · 16 sessions

Motion Capture & Performance Animation

Motion Capture (Mocap) has revolutionized film and gaming. This technical course teaches students how to capture human performance and translate it onto digital characters. Students will learn the pipeline of “Cleaning” noisy data, “Retargeting” motion to different skeletal structures, and blending Mocap with hand-keyed animation to create performances that are both realistic and expressive.

§ 01 By the end you can
  1. Understand Mocap technologies: Optical (Cameras) vs. Inertial (Suits)
  2. Execute a Mocap shoot: Calibration, Range of Motion (ROM), and T-Pose
  3. Master "Data Cleaning" to fix jitter, sliding feet, and popping joints
  4. Retarget human motion onto non-human characters (e.g., monsters/robots)
  5. Blend Mocap data with animation layers for artistic enhancement
§ 02 Sixteen sessions

The whole semester.

  1. 01Introduction to Motion Capture Systems
  2. 02The Shoot: Suit Setup & Calibration
  3. 03Range of Motion (ROM) & Actor Direction
  4. 04Solving Data: From Markers to Skeleton
  5. 05Cleaning Data I: Gap Filling
  6. 06Cleaning Data II: Smoothing & Filtering
  7. 07Introduction to MotionBuilder / Maya HumanIK
  8. 08 · MidtermMidterm Examination
  9. 09Retargeting: Human to Humanoid
  10. 10Retargeting: Human to Creature
  11. 11Animation Layers: Non-Destructive Editing
  12. 12Facial Mocap: iPhone/Facefile Integration
  13. 13Integrating Props & Interactions
  14. 14Mocap in Game Engines (Unity/Unreal)
  15. 15Performance Profiling & Optimization
  16. 16Final Project: The Mocap Performance Scene

Midterm around session 8. Final project briefed at session 8 or 9 and developed in stages until the juries.

§ 03 Final project

Final Project: The Mocap Performance Scene

How it’s judged

Recommended reading
  1. Motion Capture: Principles and Practice by 3Dtotal
  2. Understanding Motion Capture for Computer Animation by Alberto Menache
  3. Mocap for Artists: Workflow and Techniques for Motion Capture by Midori Kitagawa
  4. Game Anim: Video Game Animation Explained by Jonathan Cooper
  5. The VES Handbook of Visual Effects (Mocap Section)
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