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.

50 Ways to Sit by Kevin Parry

50 Ways to Sit by Kevin Parry follows on from 100 Ways to Walk, an inventive and clever imagining on the many different ways in which people move, and what this tells us about their character and personality. 50 Ways to Sit takes the same idea, and shows how much variation there in the way that different people might carry out a normal, simple action, like sitting down. It also shows how important it is for animators to get used to acting out their shots, filming themselves, and then using the footage as reference for their work. It's one of the most important, and least well understood, parts of the animation process.

How Disney Animators Created Beautiful Acting in Frozen

Watch Disney's smash hit animated film Frozen and you will find some first class acting, beautiful work which arguably takes the medium to a whole new level of sophistication and skill. But how do animators achieve such great acting? The answer of course is just the same as it would have been at the Disney studio 70 or 80 years ago: if you want great acting, study great actors. Below is an excellent shot progression showing how animators on Frozen used live actiion reference to bring their shots to life.

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.