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Animating characters in a 3D computer game

The problem

Animating characters in a 3D game

Anyone who has tried to create animation for a game knows that it is not easy to give characters realistic movement. 

Human movement, animal movement, and even monster movement is very difficult to create and the results of all the hard work that goes into it often look "faked".

Traditional technique

Use synthetic animation

Traditionally a person (animator) supplies key frames for the movement by moving each segment for each frame of the motion. This is a time-consuming and tedious job and it needs skilled animators to produce acceptable results.

Although the resulting animation looks acceptable in many cases, it is often obvious that the movement is synthetic ("fake"). This is caused by the fact that human (or even animal or any other) movement contains many subtleties that are difficult to reproduce with a high level of realism.

These key-frame techniques are basically no different than the ones used in the original King-Kong and Godzilla movies from many decades ago. 

Below are some examples of synthetic movement with varying degrees of success. They're all AVI-files with MPEG4 compression:

[ Raptor Runcycle (110 kB) | Robot Runcycle (545 kB)]

Our suggestion

Use a motion capture system.  

A motion capture system will allow you to capture all the subtleties of human movement. Or animal movement if you need it. Or any other movement for that matter, like falling, flying or crashing objects.

Captured motion could be used as is. Or different captured motions (body motion, finger motion, and even face motion) could easily be combined into one character.

This will translate into very realistic game characters. Even low-polygon models will look stunningly realistic if their movement is correct. Just check the examples below. And capturing motion is a fun thing to do yourself. Just remember, if something moves, its motion can be captured.

Here are some examples of motion captured movement. They're all AVI-files with MPEG4 compression:

[ Running (342 kB) | Sneaky (1,123 kB) | ADI Demo (9.61 MB)]

You may also try this Java demo. 

Note, this demo requires having the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), and Java 3D (J3D) installed. Click here for more info.

Introducing APAS

Ariel Performance Analysis System

We're now introducing the Ariel Performance Analysis System (APAS) to the game market. We've developed and used this system with great success in human performance analysis since the early 70s. We know motion capture very well.

APAS is a video-based system, which has many advantages:

It's only fair to mention a disadvantage here too: APAS is not a real-time system. Although setup and data collection is usually very quick, you will need time to process collected data. Our competitors sell real-time systems if you need them: they are difficult to set up, they can only be used in a laboratory, they must use markers and use 6 or more specialized camera's, they produce less accurate results, and all this will cost you $250,000 and up.

For more information about our system, proceed directly to our APAS Section.

What do you need?

Buy our software

Use your  hardware

Buy the APAS software from us

You can buy the software directly from us. Please contact us at gideon@arielnet.com for purchasing options. You can download and evaluate it for free (see below).

You'll need to supply your own hardware, such as:

Just let us know if you need any help. What hardware to use? How to do the math? How to get results? How to use these results?

Price

APAS Ariel Performance Analysis System

$5,000 (software only)

All our software can be downloaded and evaluated for 30 days without any obligation. Please proceed directly to the download section.