JKR wrote:

I get your point and all, but that's really an unfair comparison. PE was terrible, but also done many years ago. MC tech has come a long way. I'm not defending it, but you can't compare that super early technology to a movie that just released with freaking Glen Keane behind the helm.

Ok, fair point. Swap Polar Express for Tintin or Mars Needs Moms, Beowulf etc etc though and I still think Tangled wins. My point (which I think you got anyway) was that stylized animation by skilled animators is a lot more visually appealing than Mocap, at least for me).

I'm not saying Mocap is inherently 'wrong', it has its uses (I've worked on jobs where I've used it and others where I've cleaned it up to fit a character), but for me it's not really animation in the same sense as the hand keyed stuff is.

Last edited by Horganovski (08-09-2012 6:20 pm)

I fully agree. In my opinion the facial lacks that oomph your talking about most of the time in MoCap.

MoCap always needs a ton of clean up, at least that's what I encountered when I did a mocap assignment at school. I think that an animated movie that makes use of mocap will always have pure keyframe animation in it and also needs that. Therefore I don't think it will ever completely replace keyframed animation.

Horganovski wrote:

I found it encouraging to read that most of the animation for John Carter was hand keyed. I think directors are slowly starting to realise that Mocap is not a magic bullet. If you are going to have animators clean up the mocap why not have them create the poses from scratch. It might be a more direct route in the long run.

I think it's mostly because the director of that was Andrew Stanton. We can say that he knows the animation pipeline really well, and is really familiar with it and probably knows it much better than a traditional live action movie pipeline. So he is kind of an "animation film director" to begin with. So I think it mostly comes from that. (other than a 8 leg animal and a big giant monster of some sort can't really be mocap, right ?)
While other directors who are doing mocap are more "live action director" to begin with, and so they know much better the live action process than the animation one and have their habits and are used to it and maybe like it better and using motion capture make the creation process for them much closer to a live action film. Directing actors, placing props and the stage etc... motion capture make it much more closer to the kind of workflow they are familiar with. Directing a live action movie and an animated one is absolutely not the same (although I wouldn't call Tintin or Avatar or whatever other film done in that way, an animated movie, because I don't think it is one), so it ease the process a lot for them I guess.

Now, I personnaly agree with Keith Langoo on this one. I can't wait for the tech to be so good that no animator will have to do the crappy clean up work that nobody ever hear about, letting them concentrate on a much more interesting activity of artistic expression, while actors can sleep well knowing their performance is safe.

So that was for the subject about Tintin and all.

For the original question of this thread : No.

Last edited by Troglogeek (08-09-2012 9:28 pm)

An interesting one for me was what they did on Rango, ie film the actors interacting with each other (imagine that!) and then use it as reference instead of actually mocapping them. Seems like a more organic way to work. The animators then have great video reference to work from (something I hate doing personally as I'm not convinced many animators make great actors)

Speaking of which... getting a little off topic but I have a huge soft spot for the animated series 'Home Movies' (by Brendon Small - Metalocalypse etc). One thing that makes it different to practically every other Tv animated show is that when recording the dialogue instead of one actor in a vocal booth reading lines they would put all the actors together and let them interact and improvise with each other. The show has some great dialogue and really well defined characters as a result. The animation is pretty limited but overall the show works for me. The coach character (Jon Benjamin) is fantastic.

Contrast that with the latest series of Futurama where it seens to me like some episodes they have one of those 'sound boards' and they just push a button to choose random catch phrases each time Bender speaks. Used to love that show but it's a sad shadow of what it used to be now IMO.

Definitely off topic.. sorry!

Cheers,
Brian

Last edited by Horganovski (08-09-2012 9:36 pm)

I think people are looking at this all the wrong way. I believe James Cameron, or somebody on the production team of Avatar was quoted as saying that their usage of Motion Capture is essentially as high tech prosthetics for actors, the actors themselves act the whole thing, the mo-cap isn't to enhance Animation, but to enhance costumes and prosthetics, even if it is in many cases used to Animate 3D models.

Things like the Adventures of Tintin film which was mentioned earlier, it was motion captured because Tintin in the comics and cartoon series is halfway between reality and cartoons, if you were to keyframe it, it would lose some of the realism the characters have, but if you were to film it, you'd lose the character and warmth that the characters have. And you couldn't have scenes like this with its incredible virtual camera movement.

Direct Link

In answer to the original topic, I don't believe at all that motion capture will replace keyframed Animation, because no human could replicate the movements of say, Bugs Bunny. But motion capture has its uses too, either to enhance reality like Avatar and Tintin, or add a bit of realism to the movements of cartoons, again like Tintin.

JKR wrote:

Tintin was once a cartoon-cartoon. And it had more style and appeal in its little finger than that motion captured behemoth.

http://www.capsulecomputers.com.au/wp-c … hot-02.jpg

I dunno, I wouldn't say so myself, the cartoon series is incredibly dull up until the Crab with the Golden Claws episode, unless you can stand watching Tintin on his own, which in the cartoons I often couldn't, and the pacing was always a bit funny in the earlier episodes that were based off the comics that were meant as propaganda pieces. Tintin in the film, to me, was intriguing from the word go because he didn't sound constantly surprised, and I always reckoned that being keyframed wouldn't have felt quite right, because Tintin never quite moved like a cartoon character, only looked.

But that's my opinion. I'm a fan of the film and series personally, the film somewhat moreso because the things that bother me about the series, like the pacing and whatnot, aren't present in the film. Though if the sequel isn't based off Explorers on the Moon or the Calculus Affair I may cry, because those are my faves.

figdigital wrote:

Horganovski wrote:

An interesting one for me was what they did on Rango, ie film the actors interacting with each other (imagine that!) and then use it as reference instead of actually mocapping them. Seems like a more organic way to work. The animators then have great video reference to work from (something I hate doing personally as I'm not convinced many animators make great actors)

There's some really great making of stuff on the Rango blu-ray, they definitely get much more into the process than most do. Great stuff to watch, especially for animators.

Spee wrote:

Things like the Adventures of Tintin film which was mentioned earlier, it was motion captured because Tintin in the comics and cartoon series is halfway between reality and cartoons, if you were to keyframe it, it would lose some of the realism the characters have, but if you were to film it, you'd lose the character and warmth that the characters have. And you couldn't have scenes like this with its incredible virtual camera movement.

Because if it was keyframed we'd get the non-realistic movement that we've seen in films like The Incredibles?

(yes, that was sarcasm)

As someone who didn't know anything about the original books I enjoyed Tintin but would've loved to have seen the characters a bit more stylized, the hyperrealism leaning towards realism made a few of the characters come off as slightly creepy at certain moments.

Well yeah, Incredibles isn't realistic because of the bodily proportions was my point, well animated Pixar standard though it was.

Horganovski wrote:

People talk about the Uncanny Valley.

I think there's also the 'Meh Valley'. That's when something is neither nicely stylized (Bluesky, Pixar etc) or impressively photo realistic (Jurassic Park, Avatar etc). When something is right in the middle it has the appeal of neither and I just think 'Meh'. (Yes I'm looking at you CG Tintin).

I'm totally with you. Although I was never really very fond of TinTin's style, even as a kid I only ever read one of these comic books. Tintin has the most unappealing characters in the whole old French/Belgian comic connection, imo. (And I read A LOT of these comics as a kid )

figdigital wrote:

Spee wrote:

figdigital wrote:

Because if it was keyframed we'd get the non-realistic movement that we've seen in films like The Incredibles?

(yes, that was sarcasm)

Well yeah, Incredibles isn't realistic because of the bodily proportions was my point, well animated Pixar standard though it was.

Sorry, to make sure I'm clearly understanding your argument, you're saying that Tintin was more realistic because it was motion captured and looked more "realistic" than Pixar or Dreamworks could've done it were it keyframe animated? Because I totally disagree, if anything it looked a bit dead in places because of the motion capture.

The Incredibles wasn't straight realism but for the characters and the world they lived in the animation was totally "real". Those same principles could be very easily applied to the characters in Tintin and would've given the world a much more dynamic feel, particularly in some of the action sequences.

There were times when things like a punch didn't visually have enough weight behind it because you expect more from an animated character, they live in an almost photoreal world but because it's animated we allow the rules to be bent and expect that to happen. They shouldn't look totally realistic because they aren't, that's the advantage you have with an digital character.

In live action film you use wires or visual effects to enhance the action, in animation you can just keyframe it.

What I'm saying is that in my opinion, motion capture worked for Tintin, because I always got the impression that those characters lived in our world, caricatured faces notwithstanding, so having it be basically played by humans with mo-cap as their prosthetic face masks made sense to me.

I'm not saying in any way that any of Pixar's works are less realistic for using keyframed Animation, far from it, because Pixar have a well established mastery of making even inanimate objects and none-humanoids seem more relatable than most live action characters.

My argument isn't on the way any of the characters move defining how realistic they are, but rather the fact that the characters themselves were human proportioned, motion capture simply made better sense to me. Were the characters a bit more stylised, I might've thought the opposite and agreed that Tintin would work better as keyframed Animation.

I personally felt that Tintin wasn't in danger of falling into the uncanny valley myself, but like everything else I've said, that's just me.

robcat2075 wrote:

This ought to be a banned topic, like "Mac or PC?"

This. And Linux.

JKR wrote:

robcat2075 wrote:

This ought to be a banned topic, like "Mac or PC?"

Except in this case there's obviously one correct answer.

Yes, it's 'OR'

robcat2075 wrote:

This ought to be a banned topic, like "Mac or PC?"

This has at least been a very civil discussion though, folks are entitled to their own viewpoint and I actually like hearing varying opinions as long as it doesn't get personal. I don't think that's possible with Mac or PC

Spee wrote:

What I'm saying is that in my opinion, motion capture worked for Tintin, because I always got the impression that those characters lived in our world, caricatured faces notwithstanding, so having it be basically played by humans with mo-cap as their prosthetic face masks made sense to me.

I'm not saying in any way that any of Pixar's works are less realistic for using keyframed Animation, far from it, because Pixar have a well established mastery of making even inanimate objects and none-humanoids seem more relatable than most live action characters.

My argument isn't on the way any of the characters move defining how realistic they are, but rather the fact that the characters themselves were human proportioned, motion capture simply made better sense to me. Were the characters a bit more stylised, I might've thought the opposite and agreed that Tintin would work better as keyframed Animation.

I personally felt that Tintin wasn't in danger of falling into the uncanny valley myself, but like everything else I've said, that's just me.

Fair points.

In most everything I've seen when motion capture is applied to animated characters, parts of Tintin included, it seems to just look a bit "dead". Yes, we're expecting the characters to move just like a human would, but if you just grab the capture data and apply it your character is most likely going to look slow and and a bit flat; that data requires an animator to do a ton of clean up and pushing of poses to look like you expect it to look. If you're going to have to do a bunch to it to actually get it to look like it "should" then you might as well just keyframe it to start with.

Even in Tintin you had characters of varying shapes, sizes, attitudes, and ages. Yes, they're human proportioned, but Tintin is going to move very differently than the Captain or Tompson and Thompson. A talented physical actor can get you the basis via motion capture and I know they took that into account, but it's still going to take an animator to get the end result you want (because despite what Andy Serkis wants you to think, it's more than just him). When you don't do that well you get things like Monster House and the like.

For me mocap makes sense in certain situations, primarily live action (Rise of the Apes, Avatar, etc.) but for an animated film I'd just rather see the characters actually animated.