“Xsens MVN was my first experience working with mocap, and it was great,” said Susan Hatton, an animation major at BYU and animator on Owned. “When we started the project, I was fairly unfamiliar with professional production programs. Digging into MVN Studio and a motion capture workflow helped me understand the production process at a fundamental level.”
In addition to learning industry standard tools like Houdini and MotionBuilder, the students also had to develop a pipeline that would work within their university studio, which is designed to emulate the likes of Pixar and Dreamworks.
“That’s what sets our school apart. Students leave with the experience of working on massive projects,” said Brian Kingery, recent BYU grad and technical director on Owned. “We are taught to understand how our work will affect everyone else within the production.”
Final projects at BYU often see students working in teams of up to 45, including separate departments and artists working at every level of production. On Owned, the team knew they needed a pipeline that could easily meet the needs of multiple production teams and still deliver a fluid workflow for each animator. They started looking for a motion capture system that would be intuitive and flexible.
“We were surprised at how fast it was to set up Xsens MVN and capture exactly what we needed out of the gate,” said Kingery. “For example, we wanted to record one punch that we could duplicate over and over for our fighter. Xsens MVN’s 10-minute setup made it incredibly easy to quickly get that data and cut it into those moves.”
Initial tests with Xsens MVN helped the team draw insight and reference from the director on character animations. Hatton continued, “Our director put on the Xsens MVN suit and was able to quickly communicate his vision for the six characters in Owned. That alone saved us a tremendous amount of animation time.”
“I’m not sure how many other schools give their students the opportunity to work with technology like Xsens MVN,” said Kingery. “Working motion capture into our pipeline really helped us do something really unique. It’s just fantastic to see that hard work pay off with our names up on the big screen and awards on our resumes.”
