With all the research being done into using Microsoft’s Kinect camera for motion capture at the moment it looks like an affordable mo-cap solution is a couple of months away from becoming established.
What are the benefits of keyframe and of mocap? What do you use? Would you use another method if it was available?
Mo-cap for realism.
Keyframe for non-realism.
Realistic characters shouldn’t move toony, like toony characters shouldn’t move too realistic.
Combining the 2 might be optional, but not necessarily better.
First of all, high quality motion capture is difficult to achieve, and I doubt the Kinect effort is going to be anything but a curiosity for some time to come.
And, before you jump headfirst into MoCap, understand that there are some real disadvantages to using MoCap instead of key-framing animation by hand. For one thing. Motion capture has a certain “slippery” feel to it. For another it is putting a key on every frame of your animation which doesn’t leave you any room to tweak things.
Animation needs to be set up… the pose needs to be right, and the major movements are set-up carefully… with some exagerration usually, as well as a dynamic pose coming in and out of the motion.
An actor wearing a mocap suit isn’t thinking of any of these things. The result is that the “natural” movement from MoCap does not look right to the human eye. Instead, it looks kind of creepy. (For a lot more on this subject, google “The Uncanny Valley.”) I don’t know if you saw Beowulf, but that was supposed to be a full MoCap effort… they didn’t like the result and redid a lot of the scenes by hand, anyway. OTOH, look at a movie like The Lion King, Tangled, or Shrek, and the characters seem more “alive” than the straight-on “Natural Capture” of Beowulf. Avatar used a lot of Motion Capture, but they didn’t use it exclusively… and they were tweaking it like crazy… in the end, you almost have to wonder if they wouldn’t have been better off by just letting a team of animators do it all by hand.
MoCap has its place. For background animation, it is fine. As a reference, it is great. For actions in a game, it is fine. But for the actions of a “Hero” in an animated short, it probably isn’t going to give you what you are after – unless you have VERY good moCap equipment, top notch MoCap artists, and an ace MoCap technical director. Honestly… to do motion capture right is really hard… maybe harder than just learning to do it by hand. And even if you decide to use MoCap. you will probably end up wanting to tweak things – so you need to learn how to pose to pose keyframe.
IMHO.
There are bvh importers that put a keyframe on every frame… this is not required. You can resample mocaps to make them a lot more sparse, or clean the fcurves. I posted a modified import script for 2.56 here http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=201749.
Resampling with a tool like bvhacker gives so much more room to move.
I have worked with mocap before. I second MarkJoel60. It is not like a one click solution, there are always glitches that need manual fixing. If your characters proportions are too far from normal humans, it will get more messy too. It has it’s place for realistic VFX motion stuff and games. It will definitely not give you the sweet artsy pixar stuff, in case you are looking for that.
There’s also some growing capabilities in the middle ground between human mo-cap and traditional keyframing: mechanima. (I really need to set up some tutorials showing how I do it.) Basically though, with the animation running, av-synch and “record keyframes” turned on, manipulations in object and pose mode turn into animations automatically, allowing a sort of real time puppeteering process. So far what I’ve found is that it tends to look rough, but can take VERY little time to just lay down a basic animation, and I think there’s probably some hope to use Simplify Curves to pare down the keyframes and tweak as in traditional methods from there. (I’m also hoping to one day make a bunch of helper scripts for this technique but presently they’re a bit pipe-dreamy.)