Full Series Why don't they use motion-capture...? It would be awesome if Rebels was done that way

Take a look at this featurette about the making of Avatar - the little face rigs they have that directly motion-capture the actors facial expressions, and transfer that to the CGI character's faces. Also, the more "normal" motion capture of the large scale bodily movements, rather than artificially animating it.



If they could do a SW show like that it would be incredible.

 

Wouldn't that be super ****ing expensive?

 

Yeah, I think it would.
But in time, as tech progresses, I'm sure it would be more accessible for this kind of use as well.

 

This tech is many, many years away from being any kind of practical for any kind of TV series, and even in a movie it's never as "simple" as "rig a character, strap an actor in a suit with a camera mounted on their face & dots painted/placed all over, film it, and hit 'render'". Other technical artists and animators still have to go in and finesse, fix the broken bits, etc.

 

For films like Avatar it costs ALOT of money and takes ALONG time to render.

 

My eyes read 'motion-capturing' yet what arrived at my brain was 'stop-motion', and I was like 'What! Harryhausen? Errr, um ...'
Now I just can't get the pictures out of my head ... pictures of vintage 3 3/4" rebel action figures slugging it out with vintage 3 3/4" stormies. In front of badly-painted cardboard backgrounds. And with hand-drawn blaster shots. And other special effects.

 

Too expensive, this would only work for animation like the TOR trailers, and as many have said before there's a reason why those are four minutes long.

 

Well I imagine facial expressions would be too complicated, but body capture I think is within the realm of TV. From my understanding the characters in the children's series "Jane and the Dragon" were animated using some form of motion capture and I actually thought they moved pretty realistically.

Applying the tech to something like Rebels could be very interesting especially if they do combat scenes like that.

 

Using motion capture for movements such as walking or running should be well with in the realm of a show like The Clone Wars'. (This assuming Rebels will be animated the same way.) Especially since they use 'cycles' for those movements and would likely only need to use motion capture once.

 

I've thought about Rebels using some form of next-gen rotoscoping to film scenes between actors. Of course what is mocap but next-gen rotoscoping, but perhaps there's a less expensive and aesthetically pleasing intermediary between the two?

I've also been thinking about the way Family Guy replicated the original special effects in cel-esque style- what if Rebels looked a bit like that? Or like a Star Wars-ified Wind Waker-ish style -- hell I don't know what it'll look like, only the guys creating the show do. I wouldn't mind if they kept refining the TCW style either.

 

THIS.

22 minutes would be very time consuming and awfully expensive. Back in 2005 there was a discussion (@cgsociety) with the Dev's from Blur and IIRC, 2 minutes of their animation style took approximately 4 weeks to complete. I'm sure the process is much faster now, but it just isn't feasible from a cost of production standpoint.

 

As someone who works in Flash, cycles can be great.... but they're limited. And you can't just rely on ONE type of walk for every character, or even for a single character as a single walk doesn't convey much variety in mood, speed, weight, etc.

Relying too much on cycles leads to He Man & The Masters of the Universe. A Jedi hero in Rebels would run in, look back & forth, draw their lightsaber & toss it from hand to hand in every episode if they're used too heavily

 

Of course, I didn't mean use it once for just one character, rather once per main character. It would still have to be tweaked along the way but I think it would greatly improve something done in TCW's animation style since they rely heavily on cycles.