SoulTaker: How many frames of animation do you have to work with? Turmanator: It depends on the playback frame-rate of the animation. Our characters are currently played at 10Hz (10 frames a second). But I asked for the motion data to be captured at 60Hz in case we could go to a higher frame rate on future games. A typical run cycle is only 5 frames long at 10Hz; we stretch it out to 6 for symmetry purposes. 10Hz can be a real pain to animate in for fast actions sometimes, but we do our best with what we have to work with. SoulTaker: What are some examples of tweaking or adjustments that the animators need to make when using motion capture? Turmanator: hOuse of mOves does a really good job of cleaning up the data. But sometimes the motion either doesn't have quite the right feeling, doesn't fit a particular character quite right, or we need it to do something different altogether. That's where the null hierarchy system comes in. For example, there's animation where Barton pretended to be blasted back by an explosion. He jumped backward flying though the air and landed on his back on a crash mat. This looked really cool as we were capturing it. But when we looked at it in Softimage, it looked wrong. It looked like he landed on a soft mat, not hard earth. So, we simply hand-animated a little extra here and there and totally changed the look. SoulTaker: What company did you contact to do motion capturing for you? Turmanator: hOuse of mOves did our motion capture. They are great people to work with, and committed to quality. They used an optical (versus magnetic) means to record the actors, which is currently optimal means of obtaining the mocap data. SoulTaker: Before we end this interview, anything else you would like to add? Turmanator: Just like our texture artists might take a photograph, work it over, and enhance it until the image looks like something new, we animators work with motion data. We're using motion capture as a base, rather than a crutch. Mocap is merely another tool available to the animator. Like all tools, it works great for some things, but not others. For SoF we're using it to facilitate a huge amount of animation variety. Looking back on things, there are a few animations that I wish we would have mocapped and a few that turned out to be pretty worthless, but that's all part of the learning process. Death animations are where the motion capture shines the brightest. Shooting an enemy and seeing it react like you'd expect is chilling and very . . . disturbing. Related links: Eric (Turmanator) Turman Soldier of Fortune Raven Software House of Moves Shawn (SoulTaker) Lhota [Back to Part One of the Interview]