Why Didn't Motion Capture Replace Animation?

Not sure if it's the same but i think this is the problem with soaking zero. I think the cutscenes look super off. The game mechanically is really good though.

Doodley pls make more shorts so you can get more views 🙏

Lol. I remember Monster House and the polar express. As a kid I always knew they were fun watches but I did not want to revisit the movies because they looked so disturbing to me. Monster House looked more horror than I’d have liked it to be.

Oh my GOD THANK YOU for simply explaining to folks who mocap will never fully replace animation. And it's why AI animation doesn't really scare me.
Long story short, I worked for a place that attempted to use mocap and AI for an animated series without any cleanup animators and uhh... from what I heard, it's not working out as well as they had hoped.
Non-animators don't understand that animation is its own language. The basics of it can be taught but every animator has their own style and methods for creating. Even if an AI program were to learn all the principles of animation, it will STILL look off and awkward. When an animator animates a scene, they are using their own thoughts, experiences, and decisions. It's not something AI bros WANT to understand, because so many of them don't understand animations isn't recreating life 1:1. It's not something that can be boiled down to a simple algorithm.
The best way I can explain it simply is: the reason why Studio Ghibli animates giant tears when a character cries isn'e because it's true to life, it's because that's how it FEELS to cry. Your tears FEEL like they're bigger on your face than they actually look. AI would never be able to create that on its own merits and its programmers largely refuse to understand it,

I’m so glad someone agrees with me about the nature of really good animation or at least the very specific style that Chuck Jones was talking about. The more of state at our school the more I’ve realized how much of art is trying to take the principles of life, light shape, form, etc., etc., and exaggerate those principles to make something more realistic than the real. Even if it stylize., in my first year, I remember doing a study where I did all the math and was able to calculate how far a ball would fall and like all that stuff that I did all the math and it looked like shit and when I just did it by feel it looked so much better

I was with you until the Anti-ai spot, Dude, what the hell? We already use this in induesty, its in most pipelines and workflows and going nowhere, please stop the fear mongering.

What if we mix motion capture with nicolas cage?

Speaking of ai in corpo stuff, the first time i got to experience ai the first time was when i visited donkey's theatre in universal singapore, and his responses are just like a person would say. Now he and stitch are one of the well known "digital puppets" thats being integrated in the entertainment side, but for me i think thats another word for ai working hard bc it was a tech ahead of its time

Ai is just an over hyped data prediction machine. Ai is not intelligent and never will be. Ai art is not art.

If it's so realistic, why not just film it in liveaction? If it's so cartoony why not just animate it normally,

Super insightful video!! And honestly I really appreciated the comparison to AI at the end. It's reassuring in a time where I think we really need that -- and not in a dismissive "it'll be fine, source: trust me bro" way, but in a much more tangible one. It's one of the first times I've really seen reassurance that actually felt reassuring to me lately. Sucks that we're still gonna go through a period of real harm being done before we get to the other end, but I suppose that's what happens when we try to repeat history without learning from it. The good thing is as history is doomed to repeat itself, the good parts should repeat as much as the bad... I hope.

Afters this video helped me realize why Sid the Scientist disturbed me with it movements.

You mentioned AI at the end - and I agree with your take, actually. I've already seen some ways AI can be a part of a workflow rather than completely replacing the entire process of creating an image (or text). It's easier to get good results if it's not creating the entire image, and you get better control. Being a part of the workflow rather than a complete replacement of it makes a lot of sense. I occasionally look for stock images or clipart, and I do dabble in AI from time to time to see if one can be generated. But I find myself often not liking the result, especially if there are people in the image. AI is currently pretty terrible at creating people.

i personally think that the janky animation is what adds to monster house's charm. as much as i love it as a movie, i fear that if it didn't look as uncanny and strange as it does it wouldn't be nearly as memorable. i also don't think it would have been able to pull off everything it aims for without the relatively easier animation style

I think AI has an "uncanny-valley" problem which will likely become too expensive to bridge for practical use.

what of the broom riding scenes in that first Potter movie, they look so of its time and audiance can tell. Could one or a few artiest use a Machine Learning model to improve the look to match the rest of the films look, to even out the feel, not 2024 cgi enhance, but balance to blends with the film more?
compared to frame by frame do each frame and eyeing the difference. I don't think anyone complains about spot heal tool, that is early Machine learning models. Think spot heal over multiple frames, tracking the 3d awareness of the scene, but if label "ai" is oh no, but if label Insight awareness painting,
Just ramblings trying to figure out the bridge between what no one has issue with (for today and not likely Photoshop of 1998 was hated by purists), and on the other end being the learning of un approved material.
You can't take the oxford dictionary and use that to build a word spell check, yet word spell checks exist somehow.

I'd rather not take Baldurs Gate 3, thanks though.

Since you didn't mocap your mouth movements I have an idea on how to improve them. Currently it seems like the mustache contracts in what would probably resemble an o-shape when the audio gets louder, however it does that for all frequencies including s-sounds which don't correspond to that mouth movement typically. If you lowpass filter the audio for the contractions that might improve the overall result (or use an de-esser if you have one). Perhaps you could even use a second high-pass copy to stretch the mustache out for s-sounds specifically and combine the two

I don’t like local doodley

I hope that ai ends similar to motion capture because being able to use ai as an easily accessible tool to assist animators and humans with all kinds of work would be incredible and i know there are softwares doing this

You already cannot tell if a lot of AI art was made with AI. It helps to make it stylized with strong color and thick lines. Also AI is helping a lot with motion capture too. Like being able to get the motion data from video directly

in my personal opinion it's a good thing that mocap animated movies didn't last because the uncanny valley is all over the place along with the lack of nuance that you can find in hand-animated 3d and hand-drawn animation. the captured performance that was translated and integrated into the 3d models just don't sit right if you re-watch what already came out. Also having actors "act" and voice their characters synonymously is no different from filming the same actors on camera in a live-action movie complete with costumes and make-up. the advantage of hand-animated movies is that the everything is literally within the artists'/animators' control. it allows them to manipulate all the details and animate the characters in a way that suits their personality and characterization. the problem with the entertainment industry these days is that not everything has to be REALISTIC. there's a huge reason why style and identity exists and it has helped create the most memorable animated media that has come out in recent memory. like Arcane.

There's also the full body vive trackers for vr

I personally like the use of motion capture in Monster House because it makes the characters feel like the actual people

When December comes, a massive generative ai farm by the biggest tech companies will be announced that has the highest electricity bill by a MASSIVE difference. Ai’s progression has been fast but it’s about to get crazier (as long as that plan goes through)

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for using proper citations in your video and not just in the description. Proper citations are so important in today’s age where spreading misinformation is so easy and no one has the bandwidth to fact check things themselves. I feel like I can take your videos a lot more seriously seeing actual citations implemented properly.

I think motion capture is a very interesting way to do film. It's a very helpful tool when you are doing a fully animated film and have actors that need that physical side to their acting and not just their voice. It gives actors the same outlet that a live action film does.

Like you said, motion capture needs to be done correctly and I think having characters that don't look human enough contributes to that. Although some of the motion capture films that I love like the Polar Express or TinTin do a great job because the characters are actual humans. I understand some people will always think they look slightly off but I disagree and I think there is a certain charm and uniqueness that can be achieved with motion capture that you can't get anywhere else.

Thank you for saying that we've been here before. I think it's easy for us to get upset and stressed out when these new trends come around, but historically, human creativity and authenticity has won out over every technological feat in creative spaces.

I work as a researcher in the machine learning space. The place where I think AI will make the best and biggest strides is as an assistant to VFX and content creation. If you've used automatic wire painting in vfx software or automatic background removal, that fits with our definition of AI now. (I think machine learning is still the better term, but old habits die hard.) The automatic rotoscoping that was introduced in older versions of photoshop is getting replaced with ML solutions and made more accurate and robust. This is especially obvious with things like the rotobrush in After Effects. I do NOT miss spending a full day cutting out and cleaning up a chatacter from one minute of video.

That's not to say there aren't really stupid uses getting pushed. Much as I love the field I have a strong dislike for how badly it's being used and integrated. It's frustrating to see something I've always loved get ham-fistedly thrown in everyone's faces. :/

This is funny because motion capture never went away, it’s still used extremely often in feature films for cgi, but fully animated motion captured movies are rare now because it doesn’t fit the style most movies are going for.

I love the adventures of tintin

i dont care polar express and monster house is FIRE

Because it's more labor intensive and expensive than hand-keying from scratch

Yellow submarine remake 😮

I WAS REALLY HOPING YOU WOULD USE A SONIC GAME AS AN EXAMPLE

as an animator myself, even though i am not the biggest fan of ai at all. There is one area I can see that could help us in, if used responsibly, is having it help us with references that you may not be able to film that could injure yourself or find online.
that way you could spend more time on the planning without spending hours or days trying to find footage that might not exist, before thumbnailing them in your planning sheet, and then more time to animate :)

I love the comparison you made between the early introduction of motion capture and AI. that’s something I’d been thinking about and I think you’re right. We’re just going through the scare period of AI right now.

Love the videos, man. Keep it up!!!

Quick answer because it looks bad

I'm surprised you didn't mention Tintin as I thought that was probably one of the finest uses for Mocap in a movie imo. That and also I'm surprised you didn't mention the use of mocap for non-human uses, mainly situations like Smaug in the hobbit or with the cutscenes in monster hunter world.

the instant the intro stopped i could tell doodley was motion captured