The story of animocap.com

	My start in animation Several years ago I was working as head of research and development in an animation company. It was great. Part of my job was to set-up and maintain the company’s magnetic motion capture system. It was at the time the trend for motion capture use was just beginning. I sure enjoyed motion capture. I’m not a very artistic or patient person so I could not spend too much time in making keyframed animation. However, doing animation in real time appealed to me. It was fun. It was puppetry, only this time instead of manipulating a physical puppet using sticks or strings you were using electronic controls to control the puppets. The Boom Rises There were a lot of companies doing digital puppetry at the time that wanted to promote it as a way of making quick animation, particularly for internet applications like websites. This was still the time of the dotcom boom and there was still a lot of excitement about new and interesting concepts. And The Bubble Bursts Unfortunately, as the dotcom bubble burst, investors in general started to lose interest in technology ventures. As a result most of the work being done slowed down or stopped entirely. The Current Situation You can still do performance animation and digital puppetry today using standard motion capture hardware and software. Unfortunately, you can't do it as an individual. It's too expensive. Cost of the hardware is from $10,000 to over $ 100,000+. The software will cost you over $ 10,000. It's all okay if you're in the motion capture business in film, tv shows and games but if you want to do it solely for digitial puppetry, it's totally not practical, unless of course, you are very rich and can afford it. Workwise, you'll need a lot of different skills. You'd need to be able to model and animate using a 3D package (e.g. Softimage, Maya, 3DS Max, etc.). Then you'd need to be able to use the performance animation software, then you'd need to be able to set-up, use and calibrate the motion capture hardware. Again, you wouldn't be able to do it unless you had a lot of time and/or a skilled team working for you. Why I decided to build a simple performance animation software ? After I left the animation company a few years ago, I still wanted to be able to do performance animation. It had its applications. It had its niche market. The only problem was the cost. I've been programming graphics applications for a long time so it wasn't too difficult to build a simple system. I decided I would build software for performance animation and digital puppetry. I'd be able to use it, and if I made it easy enough to use, I'd be able to sell it as well. Why bother with something simple ? As just one guy working in my spare time I could not and did not hope to be able to duplicate the features and capabilities of the currently available motion capture software. First of all, there's only one guy doing the programming - me, and I surely didn't have the resources of the other companies. So I decided to build software that's inherently simple to use with just enough features for performance animation and digital puppetry. There's another reason I believed that the "simple" approach would work. It was something I learned during the time I was involved with motion capture and animation. What really matters in performance and animation As part of my work with motion capture systems, my team and I did a lot of animation, both real time and non-real time. The company had artists, modelers and animators that produced the beautiful and complex models that we could provide the motion for. We did lots of tests, from very simple block characters to very complex almost photo-realistic humans. At first I reveled in the technical aspects. I wanted more polygons, more lighting, better textures, blah blah blah etc. etc. etc. But you know what ? I learned something fascinating. It wasn’t the technical aspect that mattered. It was the performance. We did many tests. Many of them were carefully prepared, mostly complex with some ultra-realistic looking models. We also did a lot of quick tests with very simple objects. Like when we wanted to calibrate the magnetic motion capture system we would just build simple block puppets. A surprising thing happened. I got better audience response from the simple puppets than from the complicated ones. Yes, that’s true. There was this time when we animated several head models with almost realistic qualities and near perfect lip sync. After that, we'd get the usual comments from management and the other teams. But when we did tests with the simple block puppets, we mostly let a couple of guys play around with it because they were the comedians in the group and could do jokes with the puppets and make the whole testing session less boring. During these sessions, people would start to crowd around the set-ups and start watching and laughing. They'd even talk about it days after we did the tests. That was something that got me thinking. Why was it that I got more laughs, more smiles, and more comments like “Great work, man!” from low res and quickly made models than the ones we more carefully prepared ? Wasn’t the quality of the models, images and animation important ? Of course it was, but I realized that just like any other art, it was the ability to relate with the audience and do the performance that was more important. This is a common phenomenon in animation. Having great animation and special effects are cool, but they don't dictate the success of a movie or tv show. There are a number of high budget, high quality animation shows that flopped, and there are also some successful shows that don't really look that good. A career move After my stint in the animation company I tried to get some venture capitalists to do something in performance animation but it seemed that the field was too small for any of them. So I decided to do things on my own. I still have a full time job as a programmer so it took a bit of a long time to build the site, make the software, make the models, do the animation, etc. etc. etc. but I managed to do it all anyway. And in conclusion ... The result now is this website and the perfAnim performance animation software. The key features are: 1. The software had to be simple to use so I tried to make the UI as simple as I possibly could. 2. Models are created using a commercially available software. There was no point in me trying to develop a modeling and animation tool. There were too many already available which were already more advanced than anything I could ever build from scratch. I settled on using 3D Studio Max, a mid to high range software that a lot of people were already using. I just created an export plugin for it so it can export to a file format the perfAnim software could use. 3. Performance packs (i.e. models that could already be used in performance animation and digital puppetry applications) should be readily available. One problem with other software I used before was there weren’t any models built specifically for performance animation available in the public domain. You had to build one for yourself. And this contributed to the cost and complexity of the entire process. 4. The learning curve had to be low. There are tutorials available that can get users started right away. 5. The price has to be affordable. Well, there's actually a free version to get people started. So finally, after all these years I've finally started. I’ve got the website going. I have the software and a few performance packs and tutorials (with a lot more coming along). And that’s the story. I hope you all understand and bear with me. This is a field I particularly enjoy. I’ve used it for fun and for business. I hope you enjoy it the same way.   Copyright © 2002 Alexander R. Calero