Devblog #1: MoCap Shenanigans and Combat Rehearsal

Decided that the best way to get myself to stay on track with my blog is to make it a weekly/biweekly thing. I figured the best format for this would be a dev blog!

Anyway, here's what I did this week:

Mocap shoot for a film project.

This week I was asked to handle the Mocap stage together with my friend and Mocap shaman Yaro Copijn for a film project being created by some of our year 3 animators.

I was more than happy to as I want to take any opportunity to get behind the controls of our Vicon Rig, it's just so cool to work with and scratches an itch that I've been missing in my other game dev work.

The shoot was focused on recording 2 dancers exploring a dreamy and ethereal landscape. Hearing there were going to be 2 actors doing close contact work did set off a couple of alarm bells, but surprisingly enough we had very minimal clipping or tracking loss issues!

The last shot of a character floating/ falling through an ethereal cloudscape proved a little difficult, but nothing that some imagination, a dolly on free-moving wheels, and an emotional support dog couldn't handle!

Combat Mocap Rehearsal

As part of my personal project into recreating a combat player character similar to Sifu, ive managed to get in contact with 2 Combat Sports athletes, one specialized in MMA with the other specialized in Karate, willing to participate in a motion capture shoot I have planned for the 15th of January.

In order to ensure this ran smoothly I organized a rehearsal this past Friday before the holiday started to go over all the movements and attacks I intended to do, as well as to see who would do which moves and perhaps adjust some ideas to better fit their combat styles.

Below I have a diagram detailing what attacks I wish to include in my project:

Using this as a guide I made a list of all these moves and went through them 1 by 1.

This rehearsal was a lot of fun to do and my actors inspired me a lot by coming up with some really sick attacks.

I feel well and prepared for our shoot on the 15th and im very excited!

Here is one of the shots I recorded as reference material from this rehearsal:

Some light Christmas reading

With the winter break approaching I'll be taking some well-deserved rest. I've managed to pick up 2 mocap books from our campus library that I will be reading throughout the break:

• Mocap for Artists, a book describing good practices and technical insights into the motion capture process

• Performing for Motion Capture, a guide for motion capture actors about what it takes to perform for digital media.

Ill be sure to share some of my takeaways on these books in my next blog post, but for now I wish those perhaps reading this a merry Christmas and a great 2025 ahead!