10 Video Game Developer Roles You Didn't Know Exist

Okay, hands up - how many of you think motion-capture trivialises the character performance and/or animation process?

You, with your hand up? It's jittering all over the place. The mo-cap node's clearly gubbed. There, look, now your hand's jittering through the wall. I'm glad you exist in this fictitious wee skit, to show off the irony of the situation.

Working in modern game animation, it's almost a definite that at some point, you'll be handed some raw motion-capture data to work with. But that doesn't mean your job is somehow going to be lemon-squeezy - in fact, it means you're going to have to employ a very specific set of specialised animation techniques to get the work up to snuff. Less lemon-squeezy, and more... lemon-turgid-rigid.

You see, there are two major factors that make motion-capture pretty fallible as a technique for character performance in videogames. The first is technical - motion-capture data is often quite jittery, with some nodes spiking off into the stratosphere like Team Rocket after trying to rob an eleven-year-old, and it's the mocap translation animator's job to take these curves and make the motion actually readable.

The second is a factor of stylisation - we as viewers don't expect all the wee nuances and idiosyncrasies in a performance, the constant twitching and shifting we as humans subconsciously do and just tune out of day-to-day.

It's Chekhov's Gun: Animation Edition - if a viewer sees movement in the scene, they'll assume the movement has purpose. If it doesn't, they'll feel misdirected or deceived in some way. So in many ways, a mocap translation animator is there to clean and channel that movement to heighten the intended purpose of the scene, in ways that the raw motion-capture footage simply cannot.