I assume that that they put motion capture equipment on real dancers? I would love to see the footage side by side!

Really fun!

it says they used mocap and procedural animation.

OH sweetie.

I'm a 62 year old accountant without a smart phone.

I'm guessing "mocap" is motion capture? What the heck is "procedural animation"?

Luddite here, my friend. Who doesn't care enough to google.

"mocap" = "motion capture", correct. procedural animation is animation driven by an input. like the shapes/colours of the materials can be driven but the types of movements the mocap itself or by the music (though i don't think that one is being done here) or by physics simulations or generated noise.

*quality mocap CGI

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by blacklotus90.

That was pretty sweet.

It's where the program does the animation for you using physics (or other) algorithms. As the artist, you place a "flag" in the scene, and attach it to a "pole" then tell the program there's a "45 mph wind from the East".
Then you hit "Play" and you get a movie of a flag waving in the wind.

As opposed to regular animation, which can be thought of as glorified stop-motion animation. Each single piece moved by you, individually, for each frame of video.

You create a flag and a pole. Then the next frame you bend it here, here, here, and here, then click forward to the next frame, and bend it a bit more here, little less here, invert this bend, add another, make this corner whip a bit.

It basically allows less technically savvy artists play in a world where only "nerds" used to play.

So, basically here in this video, it's like those simulations of water breaking out of a ball and splashing all over the place. Only instead of a ball, you have human-shaped containers being moved around through mo-cap and having things attached to their shells or filled with other things.

Really kind of lazy way of animating.

@bareboards2, actually, now that I've thought a bit, playing a modern video game is basically procedural animation.

uh, this is not correct. at all.

Go on then do tell.

ok, i'll do my best:

"It's where the program does the animation for you using physics (or other) algorithms. As the artist, you place a "flag" in the scene, and attach it to a "pole" then tell the program there's a "45 mph wind from the East".
Then you hit "Play" and you get a movie of a flag waving in the wind."

this is called a sim, and yes it's a type of procedural animation but it doesn't replace some kind of "classical" method of animating. sims are used for all kinds of things: particles, cloth, fur/hair/feathers, crowds, fluid, rigid body destruction, etc, etc. the artists who do this are not animators, they're FX artists and it isn't as simple as plugging in "45 mph wind from the east". not even close. for something seemingly that simple you're dialing in things like direction, turbulence, gravity, plus the cloth properties. once you have your settings, you sim it, which can take days on a render farm for complex sims. if that sim is approved then it goes to lighting, gets put into the scene, has textures/materials/shaders applied, and then gets rendered, which can take another several days on a render farm depending on the complexity. these sims are the only way to get realistic animations for these types of materials. and there are generally many versions made at this stage to get the sim right, fix broken frames, fix intersecting, get the lighting and textures/materials/shaders working right, etc. THEN it goes to the compositing dept for a couple dozen more versions.




"As opposed to regular animation, which can be thought of as glorified stop-motion animation. Each single piece moved by you, individually, for each frame of video."

regular animation is like stop motion except it's not every frame (it's interpolated between keyframes) and is for character animation.

anim and FX are 2 different departments and often use 2 different software packages.

mocap is also not handled by the anim dept. it would be done by match move and/or tech anim.




"You create a flag and a pole. Then the next frame you bend it here, here, here, and here, then click forward to the next frame, and bend it a bit more here, little less here, invert this bend, add another, make this corner whip a bit."

no one in there right mind would do this, it's completely impractical, and would look like complete shit.




"It basically allows less technically savvy artists play in a world where only "nerds" used to play."

the FX people are way more nerds and technical than anim people. you need to be technically savvy for every dept. but the real nerds and really technically savvy people work on pipeline who were probably heavily involved in this project building custom toolsets for it.




"Really kind of lazy way of animating."

no, it's fucking hard, requires a lot of knowledge, a lot of people, a lot of cpu horsepower, is used all the time to get high quality animations, is a collection of several departments other than animation, and is used in conjunction with animation.

it's really weird how little respect for the hard work and technical knowledge i've seen online for this video. i guess people are so used to VFX being such high quality all the time they think it's easy. it isn't. it's hard, technical, expensive, and stressful.

3 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.