Outsourcing is vital to the motion capture industry

In the decade-plus I’ve been working with motion capture, it’s been amazing to see how it has become an essential part of game development. In the past, a motion capture shoot that involved two to three actors piling on top of each other required a lot of time and effort to get the scene properly cleaned and animated. Today, you can capture 19 people without skipping a beat. It used to be that capturing four actors in real time and seeing everything almost ready for animation would have been unheard of, but that’s something studios today can do.

I had the opportunity to return as a panel speaker at the recent External Development Summit (XDS), the only international games industry event with a primary focus on external development for art, animation, and more. The hot topic of discussion there was the other side of the story — we were asked what we, as service providers, wanted to tell game developers. I said: it’s mutually beneficial for both sides to be involved in the beginning, post production and the feedback and postmortem so that projects can be properly done. We’re moving away from the days where outsourcers were seen as almost a black box for animation projects.