Motion capture, or motion capture, is the process of digitizing the movements of people or objects by recording them with cameras or sensors. Briefly, this process in the sector It is called MoCap . It is mostly used in character animations in games, movies and animations.

In the world of digital animation, there is a technique that allows superheroes, monsters or game characters to make unobtrusive and realistic movements. This technique is also commonly referred to as MoCap motion capture. From crowded battle scenes to a close-up scene, or even virtual reality experiences. From the industry’s most professional studios to independent designers and developers working alone, this technology has become the standard for making successful animations today.

Since the days when we started seeing animations on TV and in theaters, animations were drawn by hand, frame by frame. For movies that played at 25 to 30 frames per second, hundreds of thousands of frames had to be drawn. It also required a lot of extra work to make sure that the characters that were drawn and then animated were realistic, and that was a huge waste of time.

With the development and increasing availability of motion capture technologies, traditional animation production techniques have given way to more up-to-date techniques, hence MoCap.

Motion Capture (MoCap) Processes

Motion capture can be done in different ways by different companies. In general terms, we can think of it as pre-production, preparation, recording session, data processing, retargeting and post-production. In the pre-production phase, the requirements of the project and the recordings to be taken are determined. In this way, registration is carried out in a flow and potential time-consuming problems are avoided. In the preparation phase, clothes are put on, sensors are installed and calibrations are made to get to the point where recordings can be taken. After this point, the people whose movements will be captured start to perform and recordings are taken. The data is then analyzed and cleaned and polished, either automatically with software such as Xsens’ HD Reprocessing software or manually. At this point it is in the hands of the producers. There are printouts of skeletal movements in fbx or similar formats. They need to map these outputs to the characters they design. This matching process is called retargeting. After this process, the character to be animated is now ready. In the post-production stage, the character is placed on the stage where the play or movie belongs.