BAF: Karl Abson

Karl Abson is the lecturer for creative technology at the University of Bradford. Today his talk was based of Motion capture, and the motion capture of animals. A very strong point he made was always to have detailed and lengthy storyboards handy. without them, filming can be dangerous and more difficult, and very time consuming. Motion Capture is however much safer, (as you can control the environment, a horse won't know the different between a fake or real explosion, to it they're both dangerous, and it may freak out.) He also talked about the study of anatomy and bone structure is essential, to re-build the CG character or animal in post.

 

The programme used to translate the motion capture is called ikinema software, which can be used with Maya to interpretate the footage from Vicon-Blade, which originally captures the Motion capture. This can then be immediately be exported as an fbx, or imported into Maya to work with.

He also said that in twenty years the technology will probably have improved enough to not have to use the Mo-Cap suits,  as it has already but the footage creates a terabyte of data in seconds, and in time, this could add detail and less work to the work.

Absons talk was very knowledge filled, with him even describing how a spider can be motion captured, (small dots for people expressions can be used on limbs of a spider) and his final advise being the easier the animal is to train, the easier the process will be. Unfortuatley I didnt have time to ask my question, which was, if you had a very intelligent animal like a gorilla, would it be easier to mo-cap that, or because its relativity human shaped, would it be easier for a human to act it? I guess because King Kong was motion captured with Andy Serkis (and rise of the planet of the apes) the answer would be human, but if the technology was around, or easier accessible would it have proven better results? Its a shame I didn't find out my answer and after looking it up I couldn't find a insight.