Mondays with Me are sixteen already! Time flies. Today I’m taking you to a very cool place: The motion capture studio (aka mocap studio).

The mocap studio is one of the elements that forms the recently established “Alice” studio. Alice  Studio’s mission is to offer Ubisoft dev teams their key expertise in the capture and enhancement of actors performances. This expertise includes audio production, multilingual recording, and body and facial motion capture.

If you are a regular mondays with Volt reader, you already know a main component of Alice: the sound studio.

Motion capture is used to capture the movements of real actors in 3D, in order to use them in our games. The actor wears a special suit with reflective markers that allows all the infra red cameras in this hangar to capture the markers movements with precision. It is then possible possible to convert the markers animation to a 3D skeleton model, to animate the game character.

The motion capture studio also has special helmets to capture facial expressions and animation (they weren’t used the day I visited.) That way, it’s possible to capture a full actor’s performance, with voice, body movements, facial expressions, in one shot (even though usually movement and voice recording will be done by different actors). The facial capture helmet is pretty new, keep an eye on Ubisoft Montreal’s upcoming games to see the difference.

The 15 employees of the mocap studio organize the “shooting sessions” by working closely with the dev teams. A simple example: The dev team wants to include a fight scene that takes place in a living room. They will communicate the 3d model of the living room to the mocap studio. The mocap will place markers matching the dimensions the rooms and use props to re produce the furniture layout, so that the actors don’t walk righ into the middle of the diner table.

Let’s finish with some actions shots!