TechStuff Classic: How Motion Capture Works

mo cap when it's done well. When mo cap has done well, you can get some phenomenal performances translated into different types of media, including video games and c g I films. It is an amazing tool and Chris Pullett and I break down how it works. So let's listen in on this classic episode. So today we thought we'd talk a bit about a type of performance that is

relatively new as far as performance goes. Uh, something that uh, I guess this falls into our movie making category, but it's also something that's been used in things like video games and and other forms of media as well. Motion capture. Yeah, you'll even see it in UH in sports. They've been talking about this for a while now. And if you've

ever seen the making of a a video or a game. Um, or you know even in sports rehabilitation, in medicine, Um, they where the people are wearing dots, little white dots all over their clothing and sometimes their faces and hands. Um, that's probably what they were doing. Either that or they just really like stickers. Yeah, I mean who doesn't. I remember being very competitive in elementary school in order to get a sticker. And also this is a tangent but

a true story. I got a gold star sticker, uh just last month, as from Tracy, the head of our

our site. So anyway, um, yeah, motion capture. Actually, there are a lot of different terms that you can use in this in this realm uh, motion capture am CAP is probably the one I hear the most frequently, but also things like performance animation, performance capture, digital puppetry, real time animation, motion scanning, which is really more of a proprietary thing, but these are The concept is pretty much

the same across the board. The idea is to capture the physical representation of something and then converted into a virtual format. So usually it's something that's in motion, but it's not always that way. Uh. Since you know we're talking about motion capture, that makes sense, but you're trying to get uh, translates something that is moving through real space into a digital format. And Uh, there's different ways

to do this. I mean you could do it the really hard way, which is where you study something and then you try to recreate it, uh, either by hand or by or digitally, you know, by by programming movements into an animated figure. But this is an idea that kind of takes that step out where you are directly porting the movements uh, something is making within physical space into virtual space. Yeah, there was an early technique, UM, And of course this is this is all an attempt

to to get as real as you can with with animation. UM. And one of the earlier techniques that that was sort of a predecessor to this is called rotoscoping. Uh. Ralph Box She's Lord of the Rings had a lot of rotoscoping in it. Well, what happens is UM, in that case is that a real uh, a real human being goes through the motions and they act through the parts that are that you're going to see in the animation,

and they shoot that on film. Yes, yes, and then the the animators basically are looking at that and are drawing more or less on top of that, they see a projection of that, and they are drawing, uh, the animation over that to capture the way that person's body looks. And this this was famous. You know, the Disney studios were famous for this. We're studying models and then they would do the rotoscoping technique to to try to make

their uh, their characters look more realistic. Yeah, and there are some artists, like I said, like Bakshi who famously would leave the film image as part of the animation, so that you had this this weird effect where the thing you were looking at was part uh well quote unquote real image and part animated image, which was it was an artistic choice, uh, definitely something that was not meant to to necessarily fool you into thinking, oh, well,

that animated character is moving very realistically. It was done on purpose, but it was. That's what I always think of when I think rotoscope as I just think of the different box sheet films, but in particular I think of his Lord of the Rings adaptation, um, which, as I recall, ended halfway through the Two Towers. So anyway, that's just bringing back memories. But yeah, that was that was sort of a precursor to motion capture motion capture itself.

There are many different ways of achieving this. For example, there were it's not used very frequently now, but there were mechanical systems where you had sensors that would be

attached to specific joints UH that would relay movement. And usually it was kind of like a like an actor would wear a physical metallic skeleton type device that would have the sensors attached to the various joints, and as the actor moved, the sensors would register the changes in motion in this metallic skeleton and UH, and that would be relayed through usually cables to a computer system that would measure these or take the measurements from the sensors

and translated into movements for the virtual character. UH. It's very limiting on this particular system. There was another one that was a little more versatile, which was used electro magnets. And in this case you talked about sensors that would be attached by really thick cables that again would go to a computer and there'd be a magnetic field and by moving through this magnetic field, the sensors would pick up alterations. You know, it would you know, moving through

magnetic field, you would get little electrical changes. We we've talked a lot about electricity magnetism in general, moving through uh fluctuating a magnetic field can induce electricity through a conductor, or putting electricity through a conductor can induce a magnetic field. So anyway, by moving these sensors through the magnetic field, it would create these electronic fluctuations that would then be measured and translated into movement. And again this was a

fairly effective way of picking up movements. It actually didn't use as many points of contact as the optical systems that we mostly think about, that was the kind that Chris was referring to early with all the dots on the person. Those systems tend to have lots and lots and lots of points of reference. The electro magnet ones didn't tend to have as many points of reference because the software side of it, because you know, we do

have a hardware and a software side to this. The software side would assume that the joints that these sensors were attached to behaved the way they normally would in humans, and that they don't have complete freedom of movement. Most of us are not multi jointed in every joint, so we can't you know that we have a imitation on how far we can move in certain directions with these various joints. So taking that into account, you didn't have

to have sensors all over the body. You would just have in a few places, which was good considering that there were these thick cables attached to the sensors. And then once you were done moving, then the all that data would get be captured within the system and could then be rendered into animation. Although this was also a way that you could do real time animation or digital puppetry. Uh, it's not that different from controlling a video game character

with a controller. It's sort of the same principle, except in this case the the video game controller instead of being something you hold in your hands, it's something you were actually wearing. And uh, I've seen plenty of instances of this. If you've ever seen Turtle Talk with Crush over at Disney, that's what they use. They use a digital you know, they use digital poetry, and it's awesome,

by the way, I love that. Well, it it would all so seeing that, um, you would need to be aware of where those cables were going, and it would it would also affect the way that you would move. You wouldn't move as naturally if you were wearing something like that as if you were, you know, unencumbered by by that, which, um sort of I think would wind itself to an upgrade, which is I think why they were so keen on optical system Well, it's also also that's very true. It did limit what you could do,

it could live, It would limit your movement. I mean, when you've got these big cables attached to you, you you obviously you can't just move freely within a space. Um. So it did put some limitations on you. Their limitations to the optical systems too, but we'll get into that. The The other problem was that the sampling rate for the magnetic systems was not as high as it is

for optical systems. And by sampling rate, what I mean is that this the entire system as a whole is taking little measure sure mints of from the sensors of you know, the orientation of those sensors within the space, and it does that several times every second. But the sample rate of the magnetic motion capture systems was much lower than what it was for than what it would

be if you were to use an optical system. So you're not getting data as frequently, I mean still several times a second, but it's not as precise as the optical system. So not only were you limited in the kind of movements you can make because you had these major cables attached to you, but also you couldn't get really minute precise measurements on every kind of movement. So

it wasn't good for things like sports. So you know, something like throwing a pitch in baseball, there are a lot of movements, a little tiny motions that are involved in that. I mean, anyone who's watched slow motion footage of a professional baseball pitcher throwing a pitch, you can see that there are some incredibly subtle movements that are involved in that. And uh, and it takes place over a very short period of time. I mean, it's a

very fast thing to to to measure. Using the magnetic motion capture system, you would probably one slow the person down because they have all these cables attached to them, and to not get enough data to give an accurate representation of what had happened in the virtual format. So if you were to say, create a video game, a baseball video game, the picture would not necessarily behave properly if all you did was directly port the data you

got from the motion capture into the game. Yeah. Another drawback of the mechanical systems like that too, is that that it's UM. It's the kind of system that not only is cumbersome and inaccurate, but it has to be calibrated fairly frequently. UM. And you know, there there's there's some work that you can do with this. But the optical systems that they began to introduce UM, you know,

generally became an upgrade UM. The only there is one big advantage that the mechanical systems do have, though, and that is that light. The lighting will not necessarily interfere with the different points of motion that are captured by the mechanical system UM. And that can be an issue with the optical systems UM. You know, because that's that's

why UM. They will be wearing the people, the actors who will be UM having their motions captured by the system will be wearing you know, those bright dots so that the computer can pick up on that. And at the beginning, and these are these early systems, there were only so many points action points that they could capture. Um. They were very limited in what they could do at first, but still you know, somewhat of an upgrade over the

mechanical Yeah. It also limited what you could have in the background, obviously, because you could not have anything that was going to be of a similar shade UH. You know usually where you're talking about reflective white substance used as the um the points of of UH articulations. So the little like white stickers is like what you were saying, Chris, Um, you couldn't have anything like that in the background because

it would confuse the optical system. So that's why a lot of these motion capture scenes are shot against a blue screen or green screen. It's so that the background does not in any way interfere with the motion capture. So if you've ever seen behind the scenes footage of The Lord of the Rings movies is a great example with Andy Sarkis as Gollum or Sniegel if you prefer, But he's wearing you know, a tight like skin tight suit with these little white UH circles all over it.

Those are the points that the camera track to create the the performance of gallam slash Sniegel. So the performance is something that's being created not only by the actor but also the animators because not we should also point out that the motion capture stuff rarely is motion capture

uh completely. Uh there's there's rarely a moment where you don't have an animator step in and tweak it somehow, Like you don't normally have someone create a physical performance and that physical performance is completely without any tinkering represented in the final product. I mean it can happen, there are instances of it, but it's more frequently, uh, something where the motion capture performance goes to the animator who can then tweak things if the performance is not exactly

what needs to be, which is kind of nice. You don't necessarily have that luxury with flesh and blood actors. I'm gonna stop motion ure in mid motion right now so that we can take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Well, especially with the earlier systems, especially the electromagnetic systems, Uh, those were really noisy, not literally noisy, but digital noise. They weren't they weren't really highly accurate. Um. The optical systems are are far cleaner and give them

more accurate representation. But you know that that's it sort of falls in the realm of artistic license. I would think, um, where they need to go in and make subtle adjustments to make it look the way they wanted to look. Ye. I should also point out, now you just reminded me of something else another drawback to the electromagnetic systems, which was you couldn't have anything metal on the set because it would interfere with that magnetic field and give incorrect

readings to the system. So you're you're virtual character would not move in the same way as the physical one because there would be some interference in that sense. So your set couldn't have anything metal in it. The props didn't shouldn't have anything metal in them, so that that limited to you as well. So each system has its

own limitations. Getting back to the optical one, UM, one of the other things you have to remember is that in order to really capture a a physical object moving through three D space and to replicate that in virtual space, you need multiple cameras in that system because a single camera, assuming that's a regular video or film camera, something that does not have three D capability, pointing that at an object it's creating a two dimensional image of something that's

moving in three dimensions. The camera can't necessarily tell where movements are happening within the depth frame of of that of that image, right, So if someone's moving in such a way where let's say they're moving their head where it would be bobbing closer to the camera. Uh, unless the size of the the sensors is such that something that's subtle could be picked up by the camera system,

you would lose that information. So what you need are multiple cameras on the same object so that you can compare that data from the multiple angles to tell how this object is really moving through this three dimensional space. So it's kind of like the idea of having parallax with two eyes. You know, our eyes are offset, so by looking at an object, we can tell how far

away it is in part because of parallax. Uh. We also have other visual cues that tell us about how far something is, you know, things like how tall it is in relation to where we are that kind of thing, or how tall it is in relation to other objects

that are within our frame of vision. But parallax is very importan and same sort of thing with these optical systems, you would have multiple cameras set up to try and capture the information that's going on in the frame so that you could tell exactly how it's moving through that three dimensional space. Yeah, it seems like um, in order to capture the correct perspective, you need that additional information,

even though you may not necessarily see it. UM. It helps the the animator do that, and the optical system to allows you to work with more than one actor um, which was not really an option with some of the

earlier systems. So in other words, you can although it requires more equipment, you know, just simply out of necessity, the optical system is really affording the animators a an opportunity to use a greater amount of information um both you know, from the different the different points of data they're getting from a single actor, but from multiple actors on this set simultaneously, which enables them to to create

more complex work. Right and uh. This also gives us a good example of how the optical motion capture systems are a passive system because you have these sensors you're wearing that are not necessarily or not even sensors, they're they're reflective markers that you're wearing. They aren't connected to any sort of electronic components at all, versus the active systems like the electromagnetic one where you are generating data by moving through a magnetic field and you have these

big cables attached to it. Uh with the optical motion capture systems. And another thing that's kind of interesting I think is that a lot of at least the early ones, the cameras would have infrared l e ed s uh so emitters. Really that we're emitting infrared lights that's outside are our visible spectrum. We cannot see infrared light. But by putting an infrared filter on the camera, you could

have the camera pick up reflections of infrared light. And that was a way of helping to identify the sensors that you had put on the actor. The actors, the sensors would be reflective specifically so that the infrared light would reflect back toward the camera and give the most accurate rendering of what's going on at any given moment within a scene. So, um, yeah, it's another way of making sure that the data being captured is as precise

as possible. I mean, that is, of course, the goal is to try and recreate the physical movements as truthfully as you possibly can given all the limitations involved. Yeah, and if you're looking for a real life easy to find an example of this, you would look no farther

than your local video game store. Um, because the Xbox connect uses very much that that exact form of technology is using an infrared emitter UM, and it has cameras that it uses to pick it up uh, the information, pick the information up that is coming back from what is being reflected around the room. And anybody who who has one is also aware that lighting is very much an issue. UM. The way that were room is let affects the information that the connect is able to refer

to the Xbox. Now, it's not, while it is sophisticated, is not as sophisticated as the kind of equipment that they might use in making a movie or making a video game. But it is very very similar technology, and in some ways I would argue that it's more sophisticated than some of those early UH systems simply because it is able to capture a lot of information. UM. Whereas you know, the very early optical systems were only using a handful of data points, right, So UM, it's it's

a pretty neat device. Um, you know, not only used for gaming. Now the hacker community has fallen in love with it too because it can do so much and can be used for so many things and is you know, fairly inexpensive. Yeah. The cool thing about the Connect is that rather than have to obviously, if you've if you've ever played an Xbox with a connect, you know you don't have to go out and buy a snug body

suit covered in reflective markers in order to play. I mean, it doesn't hurt, but you know, if you're if you can pull that look off. There are very few of us who can. I count myself among them. But you don't have to do that because what it's doing is it's actually projecting essentially a grid uh in infrared light, so you can't see the grid, but it's being projected into the room, and then when you move uh within

the space, you are deforming that grid. You know, the camera that's picking up the reflections of that infrared light can detect when the grid's being deformed by a physical object interrupting the grid. So as you move, you interrupt different parts of the grid, and it can start to interpret those as motions and commands. It's not uh, it's not as precise as what we're talking about with the optical systems that are used in movies and video games. Uh,

to to create them, that is, not to to play them. Um, it's not as precise as those. But it also has other elements that help balance it out, Like it has regular optical cameras that can have some other software that aids it in recognizing things like facial recognition software, which

does not necessarily rely upon that infrared grid. It relies more on the traditional camera functions, but has the software included that lets the the programs within recognize who is standing in front of it, so that combination increases the precision, which of course is very important whenever you're playing a game. I mean, anyone who's played any sort of game where you're using a faulty controller, or it's just a system that hasn't been fully uh it's not finished yet, it's

just in prototypes, dage or whatever. You may have noticed that it could be very frustrating to try and control something where the actual controller is not as responsive as you would hope. It's um not a fun experience, but anyway, that is kind of related to this whole motion capture technology. UM. I'm sorry what you were You look like you have something to say, Well, no, I was, I was going to say that. UM. You know, we really hadn't other

than my earlier statement about sports. UM. You know, we've we've been talking about it in an entertain amount entertainment about the the ability to capture motion to make characters more realistic. And UM that that is exactly what they want to do when they are using this in sports medicine. UM. Jonathan alluded to earlier the difficulty in uh in capturing all the little subtle motions that go into um, into

a Major League Baseball players pitching. UM. And you know when somebody, when somebody gets hurt, UM, sometimes they go through uh extensive surgery. The Tommy John procedures is UH famous. You know, they do a ligament transplant to to help rebuild a picture's elbow, and that can really throw off, um, the mechanics of a pictures motion. So they use this motion capture technology to really get an idea of how, um, how that person is throwing going about the mechanics of

their typical game play. And and that's exactly the same kind of thing that they're doing when they create these very realistic sports games. UM. But you know, in this case, they're using it for sports medicine to see if they can, uh, they can go back and recreate some of the motions that made them so successful before they were injured. Now. UM. Ironically, in in UH entertainment purposes, especially video, UM, you can

get too realistic. UM. The Japanese professor massa Hiro Mori is famous for his Uncanny Valley UM, which has been used in uses a robotics term for a robot that looks so much and and moves so much like a human that it it creeps us out. It looks a little too realistic. And I can think of we're actually

recording this in December of and UM. One of the movies that comes on about this time of year is The Polar Express, which is it's a nightmare known loved and reviled both for its story and it's um and the way that they use motion capture because the characters and they are so realistic, they're downright creepy. Yeah. It's it's one of those things where they are almost but not quite able to pass for a real person, so

that there's just enough off about them to be unsettling. Now, this does bring up something else that's kind of interesting. We have an article on how stuff works dot com about motion scan technology, which is, as I said earlier, a proprietary technology. It's it's more specific than just motion captured.

Specifically meant to capture facial motion activity. So when an actor is speaking, when they're delivering lines, the way that they furrow their brow or move their eyes or smile, or they give a facial tick, anything like that, this system is designed to pick that up so that it can be recreated virtually in a game, and it was used to great effect, in my opinion, in l A Noir.

Le Noir was a video game that came out in two thousand eleven, and it was a game in which you played a well, you played a couple of different characters, but the one you played for most of the game spoiler alert was was a a police detective. And you're kind of rising through the ranks uh in L A h during the uh early part of the twentieth century, and it's it's um. It's notable in that you are uh, You're spending most of the game looking at people's reactions.

You know, the idea behind l A Noir. It was a new type of video game where you would interrogate characters throughout your investigations, and as you interrogate them, you had to watch the characters facial reactions to kind of get an idea of whether the character was trying to be evasive or if they were telling the truth. And you would do things like watched for their eyes, and if they weren't able to maintain eye contact, that was an indication that perhaps they were being less than truthful.

Or if they would, you know, twitch their mouth or clench their jaw, these would be little little pints that perhaps there's more going on than what they're letting onto. And obviously, if your gameplay depends upon trying to determine whether or not a virtual character is telling the truth, you have to be able to represent those facial expressions as closely to reality as possible, or else the game

does not work. So they used this motion scan technology, and the way that they did this was that they had a very brightly lit studio that had lights trained on an actor from just about every angle, and the purpose of that was to try and eliminate shadows because any sort of shadows you would have there would of course affect the actual capture. It was really all about the light. And they used thirty two high definition cameras, So think about that, thirty two high definition cameras just

to capture and actor's facial performance like that's it. There, there's no other move meant the actor is seated at the time and um and had to remain as still as possible and just do all the acting with their face, which for anyone out there who's done any sort of acting, you know, that's incredibly challenging because actors are trained to use their whole body when they are performance making a performance.

They're trained to to really think about movement. I mean, if you're if you're really serious about acting, you've probably taken movement classes. And to suddenly have all of that taken away and all of your acting is restricted to just your face, it's pretty that's pretty dramatic. It's tough to do, but anyway, that's what the actors had to do.

They had to sit down and and restrict their acting to just their facial expressions without it going like over the top crazy, because that would be just as distracting as not enough performance at all. And these thirty two cameras were paired up, so six pairs of cameras. There's technically there was a thirty third camera as well that the director used to watch the scene and give directions

to the actors. Um. But these these pairs of cameras were trained on all these different angles of the face in order to capture that that performance so that in the virtual world they could recreate it accurately, which to me is phenomenal. And apparently the way the system works is you get that virtual version of the person's face and head almost instantly, which is kind of creepy but also awesome. Chris Bilette and I have a little bit more to say about how motion capture works, but first

let's take another quick break. It's funny too that they used that many cameras in the creation of a video game, because, uh, as elsewhere in that article that notes that um Circus, who was playing Gollum Um only had only had cameras on on him, but in doing so, they were able to uh to create roughly, you know, ten thousand different kinds or identify ten thousand different kinds of facial movements that they could use in animating the character on screen.

So um, clearly, uh, you know, this is very very high tech and painstaking procedure to do, but in doing so they can they can create very very realistic movements. Yeah, there's a lot of number crunching involved, and frankly, the the part that takes place after you've captured the data is can be dramatically different from one case to the next. In some cases, you may have already created uh, an

animated figure any much from start to finish. You might not have completely put textures on it or or something, but you might have essentially the way the character is going to look in the finished product, uh, and then you just map it to the movements that you've captured

and it's and there it goes. And in other cases you might see that what they do is they capture the motions and then you essentially have what looks like a very primitive stick figure skeleton that moves in the way that the actor moved, but there's no definition, there's no character there yet, And you may have animators who build the character somewhat based upon the way the actor moved through the space, so that perhaps the character's design

is not finalized until you've captured that that performance, and the performance helps guide the design of the character. It all depends on the specific technology that's being used and the preference of the crew that's that's designing whatever it is that they're making. There's a video game or a movie,

TV show, commercial, whatever it happens to be. Uh. In the case of digital puppetry, obviously you would already have the the full character realized, so that just by using whatever control mechanism happens to be there, you would be able to make the puppet move in real time. Otherwise it's not really puppetry. Um. And again that's sort of like the if you've been to that that turtle talk thing I talked about, the Disney World or Disneyland. UM.

I'm sure there are other similar ones. I think Monsters Inc. Laugh Factory has a similar setup where you've got a digital character on a screen that can react in real time to things that are happening within the physical environment. So they interact with the audience like they'll specifically single people out and chat with people in the audience. And um, to two kids, this is amazing. I mean, it's a cartoon character acting in real time. It's a real person now, Uh.

Two adults. It's fascinating because they're like, how the heck did that happen? Um? But yeah, that's it's all based on the same sort of technology. UM. And it's it's really interesting to me to see how the field is evolving over time because things like the connect show that we are adapting the same sort of technology in different ways. We're using different implementations to essentially do the same thing, and that perhaps we will get to a point where

we won't have to worry about all the sensors so much. Um. You can maybe have an actor who's not completely coded and stickers perform and and you could capture all that data without having to worry about, you know, tracking these little dots that might be something that we've see in

the future. I mean the motion scan is kind of like that, because before motion scan with that facial acting uh technology, Uh, whenever I saw anyone who was having their face tracked for a performance, they always were wearing those tiny little white stickers all over their face to track. I mean, we've got a lot of muscles in our face. There's something like nineteen muscles or something that you have to track, so um, you would have all these little

dots on your face to track those motions. Well, with motion scan you don't need those anymore. So maybe we'll see something like that. Of course, so that would really depend upon perhaps the lighting, which could if you're shooting a virtual character that's next to real characters like in The Lord of the Rings real being. I guess you know,

your mileage may vary. I mean, they're hobbits. But anyway, when you're next to real people, clearly you can't mess with the lighting too much or it'll just make the whole scene look strange. Speaking of strange, UM, while you might think that the techniques used in motion capture, um you know, bringing film into it, you know, adding a lot of advancement to to film, um basically uh, some

people sort of regardless as cheating. Yeah. I I did some research that that indicated that although some other types of animation are considered you know, considered more artful, UM, motion capture is sort of not everyone. But some people say, well, you know, it's it's not Oscar worthy because you were using these computer add animation techniques that that really um are simulating human motion and it's just it's just not real.

And the argument that I've seen used against it is, well, you consider rotoscoping, okay, why don't you consider motion capture, which is a kind of descendant from this technology. Why why isn't that okay to uh, you know, to consider for um quality and and and for rewards. But um, apparently it's a it's sort of a hot topic among um among movie makers. Yeah, I can see why animator

a traditional animator or even a computer animator. I mean that's closer and closer to becoming traditional already, but either a hand drawn animation or computer animation. Someone who goes through the trouble of animating these things and doing a lot of this work. Uh by hand seems like it's the wrong term, but but personally going through and creating these performances, I can see where they might feel that way. Um. I have a completely different perspective on it. Of course,

I'm not an animator, so that's part of it. But I think of it as creating a performance. And in the sense of creating a performance, I think it's a completely legitimate tool because you're still relying on an actor to create a performance. That that that people will relate to whether it's a character that you're supposed to love or hate or fear. That all is dependent upon the animator and the actor and several other people working to create this this performance. And uh, I don't see anything

wrong with that. That to me is a completely legitimate form of creating the art of entertainment. So um, I mean, I do understand from an artistic perspective where some people could have a problem with it. But but if you take a bigger picture look and not not just you know what technique you're using, but the end goal of creating, whether you want to call it art or not, but creating something that has an impact to the viewer or player in the case of a video game, I think

that's more important. But then again, I'm, like I said, I'm not an animator, so I don't have that kind of emotional attachment, you know, I'm not vested in it in that way. So um, I'd be curious to hear what our listeners think if they think that is motion capture? Is that cheating? Is it? Uh? Is it, as Red versus Blue would have you say, a legitimate strategy? What what do you think? What do you consider a motion

capture you should less know. Yeah, I UM, I do see where UM it might make a traditional animator concerned, but I don't. I don't really think it diminishes their UM, their artistic value, to to UM, to a work whatever it may be that they are working on. UM. And there are certain times I'm sure where uh you would argue that using these techniques is completely inappropriate to what

they might do. UM. But yeah, I mean it's it's always a concern when UM you start saying, well, the machine can do it, and we don't really need people to do it, so get out. Yeah, I don't think that's ever gonna be UM always fully the case, because you're going to have certain characters within movies that are going to be so different from the way humans are built, so to speak, that that, uh, that motion capture would

not be practical. For example, like let's say that the character that you're creating has really super long arms, and you know, you've got an actor who's pretty lanky, but

but their arms are not as long as the character's arms. Uh. If you were just to a direct translation of the actor's movements into the animation, it might not look right because the character has different dimensions, their body is built differently than the actor, and so without tweaking it, without having an animator go in there and adjust this and make it look correct compared to what the you know, the the vision is for the movie, it doesn't come

out correctly, it doesn't look right. So I think there's very little risk of motion capture ever taking that away completely. Plus there is something too, you know, creating a performance through traditional animation that you know, it does feel differently the motion capture, but that's not a bad thing, like it just depends upon the vision of the director and what the tone of the piece needs to be. And that wraps up another classic episode of text Stuff. Hope

you guys enjoyed it. If you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, feel free to get in touch with me. You can send an email to tex Stuff at how stuff Works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter to handle it. Both of those is text Stuff HSW. You can pop on over to our website that's tech Stuff Podcast dot com.

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