Polishing Motion Capture Animation

Boogie Beyond collaborated with two talented dancers from UW-Stout dance team who agreed to have their movements captured in our motion capture studio. This choreography was then applied to our 3D characters in the game. Motion capture does not replace animation, it’s just another tool in our animation process. Once the mocap data was recorded it needed to be applied to our character models: the Bouncer, Heathers, and the Boogieman. What appears to be smooth animation becomes warped as those marker points are applied to a 3D mesh, with defined joint rotations. It’s the animator’s job to correct any imperfections.

I began cleaning up the animation by changing the frame rate. The motion capture animation is recorded at 120 frames per second, which far more data than we need. Once it’s changed to 60 frames per second, a standard for video game animation, we can further cut unnecessary key frames by simplifying the curves using Maya.

I found that editing the raw mocap data can easily lead to errors but developed a workflow of beginning to adjust the feet of the character and then making my way up to the hips, arms, and hands.

Graph Editor for Animating Heathers

Above is an image of the graph editor, each dot representing key frames and movement through the x y and z planes. To make the animation smoother, I need to further simplify the curves to make them less jagged. It’s a long process going through all the keyframes, but I tried to focus on the silhouette the body to push the arcs toward more exaggerated movement.

Graph Editor for Animating Heathers

Heathers Animation Rig