A friend once asked me if using mocap wasn’t reducing the animator’s creativity. On such a big production I think it actually helped us being more creative! Simply because using mocap speeded up our productivity, meaning we had more time to focus on actual creation and design rather than execution.

What it is important to understand is that when you build a game you have to see the big picture. You should think in terms of animation SET instead of single takes.

To get a fluid result the question is not just “how am I gonna make this one animation look awesome?” It is more “how many transitions do I need for my whole system? How many variants? How can all my animations work together to cover anything the player can do at any time?”

Imagine you work on Aloy’s starting set, from idle to move. The player can push the joystick in any direction, so Aloy can start forward, left, right, backward. She can start in walk, jog or sprint, in stand or crouch, with the left foot or the right foot forward…

The number of transitions and variants can grow exponentially! So the more content you can tackle, the more creative you can get. And motion capture is just one of the many tools that help us do that.