Get to know MoCap

In this week, we went to the MoCap Lab, which is full of fancy tools for motion capture. MoCap is a great idea that makes animation, filmmaking and video games much easier and better. Usually, traditional 3D animation has to be manually made frame by frame, but with MoCap technique, we can not only have more control points, but also the actions will be more natural and controllable. I was surprised how accurate and instant the motion was captured, even some objects are blocked by others (according to my eyes), but they are still “visible” by the cameras and the computer. Avatar used a lot of motion capture techniques in it’s filmmaking. What impressed me in some news when it was shown in the theater is, they used something I would simply call “dots” (I don’t know the actual name) as markers on the actors’ face to map to the moving point of the model. This then reminds me of motion tracking. I think they are somewhat overlapped. I’m also into special effects so I tried motion tracking (as a simpler version of mocap) in Blender on my computer. At first I planned to make a laser between my fingers while due to the white background it turned out to be something strange.