Motion Capture Gallore: Aventurine’s motion capture studio
October 11, 2010 
Laenih 
Aventurine’s motion capture studio is complete and we’re happy to share some first impressions with you. It may look like fun (and it is) but it’s also hard work capturing animations. Motion capture technology enables us to create animation based footage taken using actors (in funky suits) performing all actions associated with character or NPC movement in-game, like attacks, running, jumping, emotes, dances, etc. Motion capture allows for eerily natural looking in-game animations.
From your experience, how important do you think character animations are to immersion?
Motion Capture Impressions
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For me animation is a huge part of immersion. Bringing Darkfalls visuals up to date will attract alot of new players. Many of my friends are put off because the visuals are good but dated. They want to be WOWed and then discover what a great game it is
Nice animations is actually quite important
Character animations make the gameplay mesh together, I don’t know how to explain the difference between playing a mahirim and alfar, but the differences are there.
You guys SERIOUSLY have your priorities in the wrong order.
I think if animations actually have some weight to them, and they feel solid then they definitely add to immersion.
I think animations are important. One thing I have noticed, since swing sounds were added, that it seems to play a little off if your ping is fluctuating or high.
However, after experiencing the 3rd person view with the recent expansion “Hellfreeze,” I believe that actually being able to see more motions of pulling my melee weapon out really made me feel like I was in the game.
Kudos
Swing sounds were completely pointless, stand next to a friend and swing and your realise that AV do everything by halves.
Animation is one of those thankless additions to a game, if they are done right, they don’t really get noticed that much, but they help cement the immersion without even realizing it. If done wrong however everybody will notice that the animation does not mesh right with the actual gameplay.
Awesome to see the studio already up and running! Bad animations are not really something that I notice. I kind of just put it to the back of my mind while playing. But GREAT animations ALWAYS stand out.
For those complaining about priorities, the art department isn’t necessarily going to be able to help coding
This is cool that you guys are doing this. Some people have long complained that it looks like the characters run with something up their ass. As long as the guy having his movements captured doesn’t actually have anything up his ass it should be a big improvement.
Great blog, can’t wait to see updated animations in Darkfall.
I think animations are something everyone notices, if not consciously then definitely subconsciously. The movements of characters in a game determine, to a large extent, how the game ‘feels’ to play. If a game feels awkward and goofy, people will assume (perhaps subconsciously) the game is dated and unpolished, regardless of its feature list. It goes both ways, as seen with games that are aesthetically appealing but have no substance. Quality animations will draw people into your game, while your feature list will retain them. The quality of animations has a massive impact on first impressions.
When i show my friends. They talk about these animations all the time…. I think it can change alot.
Post some videos !
A lot of DF-people think that only PVP is important. Maybe they are all crazy hardcore high skilled pro-slangers, but for the other players (with RL) graphics and character animations ARE important! As a pc-gamer since Pong I can tell you: Atmosphere IS important! Your focus in the whole DF-development isn’t wrong. keep on going!
This is great! Animations so key in an MMO like darkfall. In fact they’re key in every videogame. The motion capture should make the human animations better because as it stands they’re pretty robotic. But I’m curious how you guys will get ork and mahirim animations, perhaps leg extensions of some sort for the mahirim and you could always pay a Samoan to do the ork animations
I’m really curious to see how this will all pan out.
Alright, get the dances in game already. We need to be able to dance on the slain corpses of our enemies.
Looks a hell of a lot of fun xD
Beef up available emotes available. Dancing’d be fun to see
Ghetto motion capture studio. Though that one guy was right, you guys have your priorities mixed up. If you want to make the playerbase happy and get subs then you need to make character progression changes, pvp balances, skill caps or classes to diversify the game
“From your experience, how important do you think character animations are to immersion?”
Insignificant unless they are really really reeeeeally unnatural. What is way more important is the game being fair, upholding it’s promised features and getting it’s numerous gamebreaking bugs and exploits ASAP addressed and fixed.
I mean I never really cared about how things looked as much as I cared about how things worked.