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If you go to her channel, that's the character assignment. It's labeled "cartoon" and She can do any kind of movement the mocap assignment requires. It's pretty impressive. She's a true artist and professional.
I played enough World of Warcraft when I was younger too recognize the various animation for night elves. Might be for some different variation of elves but it's still WoW I am sure.
I saw Jinx from League of Legends. I'm not sure if the whole thing is just her tho. This is actually a kind of famous mocap actress. She's on some big games and events. Here's one that she did with AMD
It’s the other way around. The characters perform her movements. That’s her job... You’re watching the original at work. In the game, you see the copy.
Even with higher framrates in modern animation removing the need for the over exaggerated movement, it's generally believed in the animation world that we empathize with cartoonish animated characters more with that over exaggeration. I took 3D animation classes with some teachers from ILM in the aughts and it was foundational in the course work.
I can't wrap my head around it. I mean the fact that these moves originated from animation, and her she is animating the animations.
Granted it's been a while since I last played these kinda games. But if my memory is still intact, these moves were from way before GMMORPH games became fully world wide.
Oh! This girl! She works in chengdu under the name sakana. She's a pro mocap actress for quite a few big games. I think the most recent being delta force?
Why so much negativity on these comments? Damn. She's good at her job and videogames are not meant to be realistic for the most part, they are escapism.
Plus, some mediums rely on exaggerated gestures to get their point across. No one usually bats an eye if a stage artist is using grandiose gestures because it would look odd for the people in the back to look at someone standing still with subtle gestures.
For a contemporary example, cinematic superheroes like Spider-Man and Deadpool. Since they're fully covered up by their costumes and reading their face is not possible, exaggerating physical gestures is pretty much mandatory.
I worked close with mocap engineers both facial and body.
The reason she moves the way she does, with starting position same as the finishing one is so they can easily make transition animations into the other mocaps.
These are hardest to do because it needs to look smooth to any new possible animation that player triggers woth his actions.
Also, they can speed up or slow down some of her movement easily, so that's why she does all her moves smoothly, with same speed. Her arms might be spread a bit more than necessary, and that's because producers probably didn't decided yet if she's gonna carry something there - a weapon, or some bag, or whatever.
So even if this looks very generic or unnatural, she knows what and why she's doing what she does.
The animations themselves are also exaggerated to convey the emotion needed. Imagine if she just did a standard wave with no real exaggeration. As a player would you know much from it besides "hello"
I avoid all negativity and losers on all subs simply by NOT going to New and /or sorting comments by Controversial... Don't know why that is even an option to begin with 😞
They can't have her, they can't move like her, they can't be as successful as her. This makes them bitter and they try to find something wrong with her not to feel so inferior.
Was thinking that too. I guess they mean people don't NORMALLY go around doing these kind of movements unless they are purposedly trying to be more video-gamey or anime like. But still obviously some people do/can.
Shes doing a great job and its clearly a choice to act the motions out in this way its just an interesting choice to make. If youre using a mocap actor then the idea of it not trying to be realistic doesnt make sense. Why not animate it if the actor is just instructed to act in a way that imitates animation?
My first thought without reading any of the comments is that I know people are going to call this cringe because of the tiktokers that try to emulate the style.
Well you don't see it as cringe when it's in the game.
Honestly the amount of practice she probably had to do to make such smooth and precise video game style movements is hard. People don't naturally move like this.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. Isn't the whole point of motion capture to make video game characters movements more human/natural? Why is the actor trying to emulate video game movements?!
Because not every game is made like a film where we can see their face in detail or is that serious. Some have whimsy, cutesy, and talk with their mouths closed. So the exaggerated movement is show off the character's personality.
This is the reason. There seems to be an amount of Dunning-Kruger effect going on here.
Art is stylistic. There are other styles besides realism, and the whimsical approach to the emote matches this games aesthetic.
People think she’s doing the motions from the game animation, bc they don’t understand she’s the performance capture artist whose movement they MADE the animations FROM.
I think the person you replied to understands this. The question is more, why are the mocap artists intentionally making characters move this way when they don't have to because of limitations anymore.
I guess because it's become a stylistic choice of hyper exaggerated human expression they just still carry on with it. Some people might not get that and think you would want to capture more natural human movement.
It’s to give a base for the characters that the animators work on. She is told the movements they are looking for and they animate it using her movements as the basis. It’s exaggerated because animation is exaggerated and honestly it’s amazing for that. For an example of more “lifelike” animation, watch the newest Lion King movie. It doesn’t really work.
Depends on what style you're going for. Exaggerated movement has been a thing since the beginning of animation. Rubber hose, anime... Sometimes you want something a bit more grounded. Sometimes you want that more whimsical feel.
Plus body language shows a lot of personality.
It would really change the atmosphere if Tom and Jerry moved like real animals.
You're not taking crazy pills, you're just missing a piece of the puzzle.
Before mocap, animations turned out like this when everything was animated by hand. The un-natural, uncanny, exaggerated feel was a direct result of that. And yes, you are correct that mocap was created to make animations look more realistic.
Like others have said, its a stylistic choice to recreate that same feel, but the piece of the puzzle you're missing is it doesnt make sense to go back to OG animating becuase mocap is so much easier for the animators. So while the original use of mocap was to create more realistic animations, its now used outside of that too becuase its easier than doing everything by hand.
i always see this and i think she just wears a mocap suit and copies already in game mocaps.
she does do mocap but this specific viral vids of her are just her copying stuff in a mocap suit
Her name is Sakana, and she's not showing off any specific characters. This is part of her showcase of generic character animations. You can see more here:
Roger Clark, the actor who played Arthur from RDR2 has talked a lot about performance capture. One thing he points out that's a major difference from screen or film acting is that the "camera" can literally be in any point in space; the devs choose a camera angle later. So you don't have a camera or audience to direct your performance towards.
it’s kind of funny because the classic video game animation style being replicated here came from animators having limited time, money, and tech resources which is why they had that signature “video game” feeling. Now, we have a game company with the technical means to make really realistic animations with a body mapping suit, and they choose to use it to make animations artificially in that low quality video game style. It’s like using a $10,000 microphone just to edit the audio to make it sound like a $10 one.
that's not true, many of them are stylistic choices and comes from principles in classic animation and theatre about exaggerating your movements so that they read better at a distance / on a small 2d screen
Others are direct references to classic anime movements, like the "defeated/embarrased" pose, which was usually panned to in one frame for comedic effect
i envy people with good coordination. i cant imagine telling my body to do something like move gracefully and that actually happening instead of looking like a brain damaged drunk seal.
So basically she moves weird and unnatural during the motion capture in order to be more "videogame character" like, and that's why videogame characters move weird and unnatural?
Game dev here. Natural is not the intent!
1. Characters express personality through their animations, similar to cartoon characters with exaggerated motions.
2. Animations are made for the game camera angle-- top down gameplay means that stance and sideways motion may be exaggerated as a character standing straight will be less interesting
3. Combat readability-- in games, it is important to get "tells" for what a character's next action will be a split second before they happen so that you have an opportunity to dodge or otherwise adjust to that. Again, exaggerated movements make this much more intuitive and easier for players to pick up on.
They should strap that shit on me while I'm making breakfast and throw that in a game about a fat guy making breakfast, looking around like "where did I put the damn spatula again" with palms up, cursing God for making me so clumsy.
Or maybe people just want to play really lively games where everything is played up. There's plenty of realism in real life.
I just find it ironic and funny that game devs capture real human motion so the animations won't be janky, only for the human actor to mimic janky animations.
That, and because the movements themselves are very precise and distinct, regardless of personality.
They're mimicking uncharacteristic human personalities, because most people in society are basically just muppets, doing whatever everyone else is doing. How they dress, talk, behave, what they think, how they move, what's good, what's bad, you name it.
I bet if society wasn't so quick to shame and judge people, we'd see a lot more variety in personality traits, and thus, physical expressions of it.
That's because the audience is far away from the actor to they have to overact to get the acting across. It's why acting became more natural and subtle with films cause now the camera could be right up in someone's face to capture the emotion so there was no need to overact. With gaming I guess it's based on graphics, if you're doing simple stylized character designs with low fidelity then you use this type of overacting, and if you're going for more realistic then you go real and subtle.
It’s not that complicated man. She’s playing a heavily stylized character in a heavily stylized game. There are tons of naturally animated characters in games where they are meant to look natural.
Right so the sensors on her body that she's operating have a minimum threshold for how much movement they'll pick up, and the animated character is drawn on a screen a few feet a way and there's a limit to how much movement it makes sense to render, it's kind of like how old radio stars spoke in an exaggerated way with pauses like William shatner. When it's a real person you can see talking like that it sounds silly but when it's a radio show with a lousy signal you're half listening to while you do the laundry it's perfect.
Exaggerated movements or expressions are quite common in animations or acting, it's been a thing since the begging of, I'm pretty sure, both of those mediums. Exaggeration of stuff in general is pretty common in all art forms as well, as long as they're not aiming for ultra realism which, big surprise, most animation, games or other art forms don't aim for.
This actor in particular gets showcased alongside motions for a bunch of more heavily stylized games which align more with traditional animation. The kind of 'anime' game style is one of these.
The early Super Mario 64 game for example I know heavily utilized englaring mario's foot and fist when he punched and kicked for exaggerated movements to make it obvious what was going on. Punch -> punch -> kick and each body part grew to like 3-5x time from normal.
Zenless Zone Zero is probably one of the best examples today of highly exaggerated motions in modern video gaming when you see their cinematic cutscenes. It's effectively a gooner game, but I'll give them credit they are really amazing animations which I think is a combination motion capture for key frames, then go back and tweak it manually for better motions/details.
I thought the same at first, but I'm now thinking maybe it's because natural movements in a video game might seem jagged and weird, so they have yhe actors move like real smooth ig
Yeah it's like actors in a stage play, they need to project their voices and 'over act' for all the audience to see/hear. That kinda performance seems natural on a stage but it's awkward and off-putting if you see someone doing it somewhere else.
That’s their media though. Anime is like that but you know what you’re getting when watching. Same goes for their games. That’s why people watch/play in part.
The purpose of mocap has shifted significantly. It used to be so that you could get super realistic animation. Now it's just way cheaper to pay an actor and rent/buy mocap equipment than to hand animate.
A game I worked on the animators would take a few weeks to do a set of movement and attack animations for non-humanoid characters, but they'd bang out a dozen new humanoid animations in an afternoon with an iPhone recording themselves in the break room.
Exaggeration of movement. I'd like to call it a necessity from when characters were a little more than a lump of pictures so the animations needed a more intense movement than in nature.
However, as we got used to it it became more common in certain genres, particularly in ones that utilize small screens.
On the other hand: It's so over exaggerated, it's on the other side of the Uncanny Valley, not human enough to be uncomfortable and easily recognizable as "not intended to be a real human". Feels off-putting to see in real life, true. But it makes a game easy to identify as fiction, a place with no responsibility and stays well away from the uncomfortable Uncanny Valley.
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