Bonus Week - Performance Capture

We've added a new video tutorial demonstrating the use of motion capture in animation, showing animators how to take a character with motion capture data and clean it up to create polished animation.

Performance Capture, or Motion Capture, (or "MoCap"), is a growing part of the animation industry. It's something our students need to be able to work with effectively, as many animation studios - and especially games studios - rely heavily on MoCap for their animation pipeline.

The tutorial uses the popular and dependable Norman rig, which can be downloaded free here.

Performance Capture in The Hobbit

Motion Capture, nowadays often called Performance Capture, gets bigger all the time and is increasingly used as a part of the animator's toolkit. In the excellent video above, animators from WETA Digital who worked on The Hobbit explain how MoCap was used to create the barrel ride sequence in the second film in the series. It's a fascinating insight into how MoCap can be incorporated into the production pipeline, used creatively by the animators to improve and polish their performances.