OEM manufacturer Mainframe Studios Animation - Virdyn Motion Capture System VDSuit Full and mHand Pro used in Gaming Scene – Virdyn

The necessary craftsmanship of 3A games

There are many differences between 3A game projects and traditional small and medium-sized projects. In the field of motion production, motion capture has natural advantages to solve the pain points of motion production in 3A game projects.

Large number of animation production problems

The number of action resources of 3A games is much larger than that of traditional-scale game projects. To give a simple example: in traditional game projects, the character does not need to make the starting action (the transition action between the character standing and standby action and the walking cycle action). Traditional games generally choose not to make such actions, and through a simple standby and walking action. The fusion between them is enough. In 3A game projects, in order to pursue more delicate and real sports effects, the starting action has become standard. In order to express the movement details of different starting angles, the starting action is often not just a single action, but a group of actions. During the starting process, according to the starting angle, a starting result with angle details is fused. From this example alone, we can find that 3A action production actually accumulates more motion details through a large number of action sequences, and compared with traditional game projects, the amount of action resources increases exponentially.

The motion capture process is precisely a choice that greatly improves the efficiency of motion production. Although motion capture still requires post-processing, the animator has obtained real motion data as the basic motion before manual production. On this basis, artistic processing is performed. Compared with pure hand keys, the production speed has a huge efficiency improvement. If realism is used as a style requirement, motion capture animators generally believe that the efficiency of motion capture should be ten times that of a senior animator’s pure hand KEY production.

From the perspective of project cost and development progress, motion capture offsets the huge workload brought by 3A games through natural efficiency advantages. The number of animation teams in the project may not be much different from the number of non-3A projects, but it can support 3A games. The magnitude of the action production.

Guaranteed realism

The pursuit of realism has become an important label for 3A games. In terms of action realism, the data obtained by motion capture based on real-world physical movement is naturally very realistic and has natural advantages. From a team building perspective, it’s a shortcut. Extremely realistic hand-key animations are often only mastered by senior animators, and the team may not have time to wait for animators to gradually improve their skills, nor have they had the opportunity to introduce a large number of senior animators. Using real motion data from motion capture, this takes the pressure off of creating realistic game motion.