Who Uses Motion Capture?
		Motion Capture  ·  What is it?  ·  Why use it?  ·  Recording vs. real-time  ·  Magnetic ·  Optical ·  Electro-mechanical  ·  Workflow  ·  Specialized tools ·  Who uses it?	Products  ·  Motion Captor  ·  Gypsy  ·  Datagloves  ·  Cybergloves  ·  Face Trackers  ·  MotionBuilder

Games

Game development is the largest market for motion capture. With games drawing as much revenue as movies, it is easy to see why game development often calls for enormous quantities of motion capture. The immense competition to produce the 'coolest game possible' (thus becoming a top-seller - hopefully) means that greater production capabilities mean higher quality. More time is left for aesthetic finishing touches and fine-tuning of game play.

Generally there are two main types of 3D character animation used in games: Real-time playback vs. cinematics. Real-time allows the game player to choose from pre-created moves, thus controlling the character's moves in real-time. Cinematics are the fully rendered 'movies' used for intros and 'cut-scenes'. Often the last part of game production, or a process that is sub-contracted to a separate studio, cinematics are generally not essential to game-play, but do add a lot of appeal to the game, and help immensely with story development and mood generation.

Video and TV

Performance Animation
Real-time motion is becoming popular for live television broadcasts. Motion capture can be used to place a virtual character within a real scene, or to place live actors within a virtual scene with virtual actors, or virtual characters within a virtual scene.

Motion capture for real-time broadcast requires mock-ups of any non-standard physiology (big stomachs, tails, etc.) to keep the performer's motions from causing the character's limbs to interpenetrate its body. Joint limits on the shoulders and knees (such as found in Kaydara FiLMBOX Animation also help maintain believability of the character. A real-time adaptation feature such as FiLMBOX Animation's real-time motion mapping (from the performer's skeleton to a different proportioned character's skeleton) is essential when the character's body is very different from the actor's body.

When combining live elements with virtual elements the real and virtual cameras must share the same properties (perspective, focal length, depth of field, etc.) otherwise the illusion looks strange.

The Gypsy is ideal for real-time broadcast animation since it is so easy to transport, fast to set up, easy to use, and it works well in just about any environment.

Daily Features
Use of the Motion Captor system, combined with Kaydara Filmbox online is makes it easy to produce daily 3d animated features, allowing tv stations to keep their content fresh and exciting, and giving viewers yet another reason not to 'touch that dial'.

Post-Production for Ongoing Series
Motion capture for ongoing series is becoming very popular. Creating a weekly show without motion capture invariably causes shows to be late or production studios to go bankrupt. Having an efficient motion capture pipeline is essential to the success of an ongoing character animation based series.