In Response To: Re: Thank You from Bungie Animators (Ibeechu)
I read every word, btw...
2 cents.
mocap is a tool that eases some of the animator's grunt work. The artform that is now teething is taking mocap data and injecting "life" into it.
It's still a work in progress - a hybrid.
Don't fear change or tools that make life easier.
Embrace them and improve your own process.
/not an animator (though I've done animation)
: Mild rant from an animation snob ahead :)
: The keyword there is believability. Tradition animation ranges from the
: realistic (think of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park) to the outrageously
: cartoony (Chuck Jones, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs). What connects
: them is believability. A movie like The Incredibles is a great example for
: both styles. Much of the business on screen isn't realistic at all, but
: you feel it. You believe it. The fact that it was animated entirely by
: hand does not make it any less belivable, and it, in fact, gives it a huge
: advantage.
: The art of animation comes from reducing movement to its essence. It's about
: distilling something to its core and then building on top of of that. It's
: about finding what's appealing about a certain movement or why it
: communicates an idea the way it does. You're able to break down reality to
: its simplest form. It's literally a caricature of motion. Stripping out
: everything that's unnecessary, leaving only what tells a story, and then
: exaggerating that.
: Animation is made up of a series of poses that communicate an idea. You have
: to worry about how the silhouette reads, and things like lines of action
: to draw the audience's eye. A great single pose can tell what a character
: is thinking more clearly than any sort of dialogue, because it goes down
: deep to the fundamental essence of what a character is feeling.
: With mocap, you don't really have a chance to think about clear posing or
: timing. It's literally a reproduction of an actor. And if you've ever seen
: mocapped animation by itself, it just looks awful. Like, think about
: movies like Final Fantasy and Beowulf and The Polar Express. It's lifeless
: and bland and off-putting. Mocap has to be polished by an animator before
: it's usable. But even so, the majority of the data is there already. You
: can maybe exaggerate a pose or two, but you don't get to push it as far as
: you normally would, and you certainly can't change the timing that much.
: That fundamentally goes against every principle of animation. If you want
: realistic human actors, why not do live-action? Animation is caricature
: and believability, not realism. Check out Al Hirschfeld's caricatures.
: They look like the people they represent more than the people themselves,
: because they remove things you wouldn't normally see and then exaggerate
: the things that are recognizable. It's almost like they're how you'd
: remember someone, not what they're actually like. And that makes it
: connect so much deeper than just a photograph of that person.
: Now, I think there are some limited uses of mocap. I think it worked very,
: very well in Avatar, especially since it had to integrate with live
: actors. An animator could have done it but ultimately it can't look like
: animation, so you wouldn't be thinking about posing or timing much anyway.
: In a case like this, it has its place. Hell, maybe even in a game like
: Reach where the characters are supposed to be as "real" as
: possible, maybe it even has a place, but I still don't think so. A game is
: still 100% CG anyway. You don't have to integrate with live action, and a
: good animator will no doubt add a lot to the cinematics and whatever.
: Don't forget that animators are actors. We do the same things actors do,
: except we act through a puppet or a drawing rather than our own bodies.
: But because of that, we have so much more control than a live action actor
: does. We can play very clearly to camera and that leads to even clearer
: staging. We can exaggerate what you see and remove everything you don't.
: Ultimately, realistic or not, it makes a character believable and feel
: alive. This character is real and he thinks and he has goals. It's the
: reason Bugs Bunny is more believable than Beowulf.
: So there's my thesis for tonight. I have a huge passion for animation and I
: love talking about it so I might have gotten carried away, but I hope I
: explained why mocap annoys me.
: Cliffs: - Animation caricatures reality, while mocap just reproduces it.
: - Caricatures often feel more believable than real life because they
: exaggerate the things that are recognizable and true to us, while removing
: everything that isn't.
: - Just because mocap captures how a real person moves doesn't make it
: believable. The characters in Reach moved realistically, but (all writing
: aside), did you ever really feel like they had emotion? See below
: Here's a postscript to my post. Reach's characters had much more advanced
: facial rigging and controls, but it ended up being overused. I mean. Fuck.
: Look at this scene from Halo 3, whose characters had much simpler faces.
:
: She gets the idea to kill herself and Johnson, but you can see the exact
: moment, when she looks into his eyes, that she actually understands it.
: Then, as her humanity really starts to creep through, she relaxes her arm.
: Johnson shouts "Now!" and her military training kicks in. She
: straightens her arm and her whole body. You feel her go through every
: thought. And she doesn't say a word. It's all in her animation; her
: acting. Halo 3 actually had loads of examples like this. Hell, so did Halo
: 2, especially with the Arbiter. And they didn't even have Halo 3's facial
: rigs back then. I mean, Christ. In Cortana's rescue in Halo 3, the Chief's
: poses are so great. You actually feel what he feels without seeing any
: sort of face at all; it's all in his body. I challenge you to find any
: moment like these in Reach. The facial rigs are better, but the acting is
: lifeless.
: For the record, I really, really do not fault the animators in this. I've
: seen a lot of their reels and they're all very talented. And they actually
: did a great job with everything that wasn't mocapped (and with cleaning up
: the mocap). I have to blame it on the decision to use mocap in the first
: place, because its contradictory to the philosophy of animation.
: I'll just leave it at that for now :P
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