(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); You might have heard of the new motion capture feature used in Black Ops. Let me explain this into a bit more detail.

To tell a story right, you need actors that can convince the gamer to be part of the story. To tell the story in a game, actors were hired to speak the voices of all the characters, who would later be finished by 3D animators. This used to be a difficult process, mainly because of the available technologies and the limitations of hardware. Today, it's a bit different...

Treyarch is a studio that's always on the look-out for the next best thing, all in name of giving the gamer an even better gaming experience than they ever did before. Before Call of Duty: Black Ops, they had to record voice, body movement and facial animations completely separate of each other, and would be put together by a team of animators. This time around, Treyarch is using a new technique called Full Performance Capture that allows the actors to do this all in one take. Where before the movement of characters in the games looked a bit "animated", this technique really helps making it look believable.

The studio used for this technique is Giant Studios, based in Los Angeles, who have been put on the map because of the beautiful work they did for James Cameron in his movie "Avatar". But how does this technique really work?
Full Performance Capture

Filming takes place on a spare motion-capture stage called "the volume." Actors wear skin-tight bodysuits with reflective markers; every movement is tracked by an array of more than 100 fixed cameras. Each reflective marker will be tracked by each camera, at any time of recording.
When one marker goes out of view for one camera (because the body is in the way for example), it will still be visible for many of over 100 cameras. The camera data is immediately fed into a computer that recreates a 3D replica of the actor's every movement. When looked at the actual data from the camera, you would actually see a cloud of stars in the shape of a body in an empty 3D area.

Jeremy Dunn action with Full Performance Capture for Black Ops

This data is then used to actually move a 3D character in a computer program to do the exact movement the actor did. This is possible as the recreation of the characters in 3D is not just a recreation of the outer body of a person, it's actually a recreation of bones, muscles and skin. Every star/marker that moved in the full performance capture studio will move these bones and muscles in the computer program. As you can see in the image to the right, the facial movement of every muscle will be recorded, giving it the very natural looking effect that Treyarch is going for.

In the so-called "volume" the actors act as they would do for an actual movie, so if they will get in to a car in the scene they're acting out, they will actually do that when the cameras are recording.

This is from AVATAR but its the exact same TreyArch used for Black Ops.

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mr-IgjcBb0"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mr-IgjcBb0[/ame]


Shown 1:55-2:47

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWUmKe6iJcU"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWUmKe6iJcU[/ame]

It is pretty amazing how they do this in my opinion. Hopefully the Campaign will be great then. :y:

This Is Kind Of Old But Still Great For People That Dont Have Time On Their Hands