Animatrik suits up for Gears of War 4

When you’re dispatching enemy ‘Swarm’ with an array of weapons in Gears of War 4, just remember that many of the character moves - from simple crouching to the biggest stunts - were enabled Animatrik’s motion capture technology. 

This newest Gears of War third-person shooter is the latest in the series from Microsoft Studios in which humans on the planet Sera take on some rather nasty creatures. The action in the game is intense and features stunning photorealistic realistic human performances. Which is where Animatrik comes in, helping with planning and executing the months of motion capture sessions directly featured as gameplay and cinematics. Also, read our interview with Cinematic Director, Greg Mitchell, here.

Planning for battle

Like all of their projects and motion capture, Animatrik gets involved early in the planning stages. For Gears of War 4, the company referenced animatics that had been created, and then helped develop a shortlist; basically a series of planned capture moves to satisfy the scenes that were required. Motion capture sets and props, all scaled appropriately for the game, were then constructed and the set dimensions were mapped out. The idea was to have everything ready to go for the shoot, all the way down to shooting schedules and call sheets.

Lights, camera, mocap! 

All that planning came in particularly handy for shooting the motion capture on Animatrik’s stages. Here, performers would be suited up in mocap suits and calibrated to the motion capture system. Each take could involve a simple action such as a bend, crouch or even be far more complex, like a jump or major stunt. The team at Animatrik recorded director's notes and comments and reference footage. 

Animatrik also had to adapt to the shooting requirements. At one point it was determined that the 40 x 40 volume of the stage was not quite large enough, so the studio was overhauled to provide a stage that is now permanently 40 x 60. Even then, some shots were so big in scale that they were broken into two sections. 

Motion capture for gameplay could be considered the simpler - but still crucial - aspect of the shoot since this involved a lot of walking around and idle scenes. Cinematics, on the other hand, were more akin to making a live-action film. Here, Animatrik concentrated on delivering an emotional connection between the characters and the game players. That was helped via shooting many takes and producing a variety of performances to choose from. 

Another challenge during shooting came from the size discrepancies between mocap performers and game characters. The characters are much taller than their actor counterparts. But to deal with the size difference, Animatrik devised an average global scale solution that was applied to the CG models, sets and props. This means everything could be scaled back to the original size when final delivery of the capture was complete.

Capture is done...what next?

Animatrik’s role doesn’t end when the motion capture shoot does. After capturing the mocap data, the company provided Microsoft with an ordering tool to review footage, revisit their comments from the shoot and order shots together. The data was also processed and motion capture animation applied on the Gears of War 4 characters. All this was aided with Animatrik’s own internal tools for quality checks and packaging up the data for delivery. 

The results in the game are clear. Characters move realistically and their actions push the story along. That’s in part thanks to the performances of the mocap actors and the role of Animatrik in pushing shots, takes and stunts through their pipeline. One Animatrik employee even noted how close the company became with the performers after months of shooting.  

“What really stood out to me over everything else, was the camaraderie that developed between our studios and with the actors. We had so much fun together and I love the whole crew - I'm missing seeing them around these days!”