Animations make up a large part of the production for The Darken, so they are a huge topic for us. While there are some pretty good pre-made animations available on asset stores, they aren’t a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. We needed to make our own animations, and doing them all by hand seemed impossible. Initially, we started out by buying a single inertial capture suit. After some testing, we found out pretty quickly that inertial suits weren’t the way to go for this project. We needed better data, and we needed to support the tracking of multiple actors and props in a single scene, all at once.

We reached out on a Facebook group called “Motion Capture Society”, where we got some solid advice and recommendations and decided to look for an optical motion capture solution instead. We got in touch with Vicon, who came highly recommended by the group. They offered to fly us out to their headquarters in Oxford, where they demoed a replica of the setup we had in mind – giving us a very accurate look at what we could expect from our captures. And honestly, the results we saw were staggering. The data was remarkable, and their software Shogun takes care of so much of the work, including great occlusion handling and even real-time streaming from the capture right into the game engine. We realized then and there we needed to work with Vicon, and we’ve been working with them ever since!

The setup we built is a 100sqm dedicated studio with a 60sqm capture volume with decent ceiling height. We currently use 12 Vero 2,2 cameras, one monitoring camera, and a single powerhouse computer to run everything. It may seem that you’d need way more than 12 cameras for that space, but honestly, the hardware in those cameras paired with great software from Vicon just gives us phenomenal, clean data all around, even with multiple actors. We also sound-proofed the studio and treated the walls with acoustic foam to improve the quality of our sound captures. For the flooring, we bought some basic affordable gym mattresses, which have worked very well for us to dampening the sounds of footsteps as well as providing a soft floor for our more action-heavy mocap.

We built the studio literally next door to our office, which has turned out to be very convenient. Having our own studio so close by means it’s very easy for us to mocap whenever we need to. Even our devs will jump in to record some animations, as it’s a very quick and easy process to hop into a suit and start recording by yourself.

Cutscenes and Dialogue

For our cutscenes and dialogue, we record the body, face, and voice of our actors all at once. To capture the body we’ll use the Vicon system, but for the face, we’ll use facial-capture helmet equipped with a camera from Faceware plus some simple LED strips to provide consistent lighting to the actor’s face. As for sound, we’ll mount wireless lavalier mics to our actors’ helmets, which has worked really and give us isolated captures from each actor. Cutscenes and dialogue are probably our most straight-forward captures, as the data from the capture is already really good and do not require much processing and cleanup. Most of the work is fine-tuning the data as necessary, adding finger movements (although Vicon just released a beta of Shogun with finger tracking support!) and making sure our props are behaving well in the final assembly.

Combat Capture