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   Mo-Cap Part 2, Page 4

The Work Has Just Begun...

The motion capture sessions lasted three days, and everyone involved judged it a huge success.

"These guys jam," Brian Rausch says to me of the SWG team. "You should write that down. They're a very fast group, very efficient. They know what they want. Sometimes guys don't know what they want."

Joe Shoopack feels likewise about the SCEA team that runs the studio. "Those guys are great to work with. We couldn't get this much done in this amount of time without their talent. They've been doing mo-cap for games since the earliest Playstation titles, so they've got a lot of years invested in doing it. They're the best in the business."

"It all looked so good, I just can't wait to get back home and see it on a character," says Jake. "Of course, we now have wearables. I want to put those with some of the East Indian dances. It's just going to look amazing. I think people are just going to flip when they see this. No pun intended."

This is only the beginning of the work on the in-game characters. An enormous amount of data was gathered from just these three days of work, and will take months to review, edit, and implement in the game. Much of that work is taking place right now in both the Austin and San Diego studios.

It didn't take too much coaxing to get the SWG team to release a sample of the character movements. They're as excited about showing it as you guys are about seeing it. Here is a live video of a West African dance style performed by Sabrina Fox, and a special treat: A Rodian female model from the game performing the very same dance move. This is a unpolished, work-in-progress animation. As work continues on the model, more animations will be added, such as hand and finger movements.

Here is a special first glimpse of player character animation. I'm betting you'll never look at a Rodian the same again.

1-2-3-4

--Clayton Kroh (ckroh@soe.sony.com)

613x224 - 10.88MB


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