Stock Motion Capture Sources

[Sybixsus]

I need a fairly large quantity of character animations for my next project and I've got two choices. Either find a really good animator or find a good source of stock motion capture. I've not yet managed to find an animator capable of producing the quality of animation and able to devote enough time to complete the project, so I thought I'd try the alternative.

House Of Moves looked to be perfect, since their site says they have a large collection of stock motions suitable for games. Unfortunately their site seems to be abandoned ( broken links, old information ) and emails to their site bounce back.

Credo seem cheap, but the quality is very variable and their selection of moves is poor.

E-Motek has reasonable quality and exceptionally cheap, but their selection is extremely poor and very specific ( volleyball? rowing? )

And of course Turbosquid has a whole bunch of overpriced rubbish. :D


So I'm wondering if there are any other alternatives.

[mathgenius]

This is really interesting. I had no idea such services even existed!

So what kind of animations do you need ?
It seems to me that e-motek (http://www.e-motek.com/entertainment/stockmoves/) has a lot of basic moves, but i have no idea if they can be patched together to make eg. "jumping over short wall using one hand with gun in other hand". And it's free for personal use but you can't redistribute the data? Not sure if I understand the licensing scheme. I've just downloaded one of the walking moves (as pure c code) and it looks sweet :D.

Simon.

[Sybixsus]

It is possible to link, combine and blend those motions from E-Motek, but you would need a good grasp of animation in 3dsMax, Softimage, Maya or whatever you're using. Or you could actually link and blend the animations in your code, I suppose.

The E-Motek animations are free for non-commercial use, and 50 Euros for commercial use. That's over 1,000 animations so it's excellent value if they have some or most of the animations you need. They don't really have much in the way of "with gun", which is sort of odd for a game-oriented package.

When I was browsing House of Moves website I noticed they mentioned having a collection of "Special Forces Military" motions. That's the kind of thing I was after.

[Chris00]

This is really interesting. I had no idea such services even existed!

Same here

Although I'm working on other projects right now, I'll have to look into all of this when I get back to game development.

[Redclaw]

www.leadwerks.com has a program called Character Shop that contains 80 high quality humanoid animations.

I haven't used it so I have no idea if it is any good, but there's a demo you can download.

[Sybixsus]

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, Character Shop is missing a lot of important animations, and the author appears to have no plans to add them. Also, three of the animations are bugged ( arms fall well below ground level on some of the falling animations ) and he has shown no interest in fixing them since I reported it.

[nquijano]

I need a fairly large quantity of character animations for my next project and I've got two choices. Either find a really good animator or find a good source of stock motion capture. I've not yet managed to find an animator capable of producing the quality of animation and able to devote enough time to complete the project, so I thought I'd try the alternative.

You might want to check out Elemental Motion (http://elementalmotion.com/), as they do both animations and mocap in-house.

[Sybixsus]

You might want to check out Elemental Motion (http://elementalmotion.com/), as they do both animations and mocap in-house.

Thanks, but as I said, I'm looking for stock motion capture, not a studio capable of producting custom motion capture. Stock motion capture is going to be expensive enough, and quite possibly beyond my budget for the amount I need. A custom solution is far beyond my means for a self-financed game.