Uncharted

As we are making a game cinematic for this module I have decided to look into the making of a cinematic of a well known and popular game, 'Uncharted'. This game amongst many major titles uses motion capture when creating the cut scenes and in game animation. Motion capture is where the actions/movements of a person are recorded and then by using that information it is translated to create animations. By using motion capture,  it would speed up the process and produce more realistic results, complex movements are more accurate.

For the first Uncharted game because of the space they were using it was not suitable to record audio at the same time so this had to be synced over the animation at a later date. Even though this produces good results it's better if it is all recorded together at the same time, easier and more efficient. Obviously this depends on the space, you need a room that doesn't give you back any echo or where other sounds are present.

The video below shows part of an Uncharted cutscene that has been broken down to show the process. You can see the videos at the top are what is being captured by the cameras and the actors in the mo-cap suits that allow for this to happen. The bottom left is how the whole scene would look without textures, just the basic outlines of the environment and the characters movements. The bottom right is the fully rendered sequence. Further in to the video you can see that even though there are certain objects that are not shown in the basic modelling, it still needs to be recorded in the first stages. This gives something for the actors to get a grasp on and the actions will be more believable. The props are modeled and added in at a later stage.

There will always be pros and cons for both motion capture and key framed animation, as we are doing key framed animation it will undoubtedly take longer however we can put more emphasis on exaggeration and the 12 principles of animation. Even though motion capture is quicker, for exaggeration such as squash and stretch, this still needs to be done afterwards as movements that do no abide by the laws of physics cannot be captured. Depending on the style of game would determine on what technique is used, whether it be motion capture (more realistic) of key framed (more stylized).