The developers describe the first full performance capture shoot: four actors, 32 OptiTrack Prime 41 cameras, V2 helmet cams, facial markers and weighted props. They also cover the female avatar's progress, autopilot, NPC behaviour, cargo mass in handling, the Cassandra backend, the Bengal carrier refit and dogfighting maps.
It was a bit chaotic. It was a long, really long week, but we came out in the end. We introduced a lot of things we never had in the pipeline before, so it was a lot of challenges. We had to sync everything up with time code. We had to bring the headcams into the system. But we got it all figured out in the end, and we got some good stuff. We got all the actors together, and I've been going through the data last week, and it's looking very good and nice and clean.
Well, I think it's extremely similar in that the main goal is to capture performance. In film, you're really worried about one or two cameras. If there's a B camera, you're worried about just the frame itself, composition, and sort of the movement within that frame, if the emotion's coming through. For a game, for motion capture, you sort of have to be a little bit more open-ended, as far as you don't know exactly where the camera's gonna be, the environment or space maybe hasn't been worked out fully yet, so you're probably focused a little bit more as a director on the performance itself, almost like a stage play.
Well, in order for the software to properly pick up the actors' faces, you have to mark them up. You have to put small dots and small lines around their mouths to better track their muscle movement, basically.
So the situation with the female as of right now: the model is pretty much finished and has been approved. They're working on her RSI space suit right now. And then we're going to be handing her off to Brian and his crew to get motion capture and all the animations in it.
So let's do the second question first. So autopilot is going to be your Wing Commander style, Privateer style, any of those, where there's a set of nav points on your map and you can autopilot to one of them from any location, but you have to be aimed at a specific waypoint. You will be able to eventually put pins in your map for your own waypoints, but generally you're following accepted, established trade lanes. As far as the disengage distance, that's one of those things we'll figure out as we play the game. I mean, you do need to be out of combat to autopilot, but we don't know exactly how far you need to be yet.
NPCs are individuals. That's one of the things we're really stressing, is that they have their own goals and their own careers just like the players do. Their own AI, which we did look at last week. So yeah, what they're going to look for is the ships that they need to do their jobs, just like players do. Now, of course, in the case of people who just have ships because they need them to travel, there may be some sort of trend following there, because the ships that are most popular will be manufactured the most. So some NPCs will look like they're following trends that the players set, but generally they'll just do their job.
Yes, sir. It will, right? It's physics. If it's physics, Chris cares about it really, really, and we all do too, of course. And yes, so cargo mass and ammo mass absolutely makes a difference.
I can tell you a little about that. We really should have programmers here, and they'd probably talk your ear off about it. So we're using a clustered Cassandra database, which is the back end. And we are using NoSQL, for those of you who are curious. So it's not a relational database. There you go. For the nerds out there.
So, yes, the Bengal carrier is getting a pretty significant refit for Squadron 42. That's not one I would use 'soon' on. The first capital ship you're going to see that really unveils how capital ship systems are going to work is going to be the Idris. And those of you who are reading Jump Point have already seen some of what we're doing with the Idris.
So right now there are two maps. I think there's a Broken Moon map, and I don't remember the name of the other one right off the top of my head. And that will continue to expand, of course. But there's a bunch of different game modes that can be played on each map. So that's really what's going to give you the variety, at least for now. There will be more coming.
TL;DRFour actors perform together on stage like a play, with face, audio and body movement captured simultaneously, so the performance fits together better than separately recorded elements.
Well, we have four actors on stage and they're playing off of each other, kind of like a stage performance. And we're capturing all the elements of the performance all at one time. Like you said, in the olden days, you did everything separate and then you kind of had to stick them all together in game, and there was kind of this deterioration. What do you call it? Disattachment?
Yeah, the face expressions and the audio and the body motions never quite fit together. With full performance capture, you're capturing the face, you're capturing the audio, and you're capturing the body movement all at the same time.
We have 32 Prime 41s and we have two Prime 17s. Prime 17s are motion capture cameras, but they're the last generation of motion capture. They have a wider angle and we use them for capturing reference, because these cameras also double as reference cameras if we decide; they shoot black and white as opposed to just shooting IR.
Yeah, the more coverage you get, the less likely you're going to have occlusion from markers. Occlusion is when a marker that's on the actor gets hidden from the cameras and the camera can't see it. Then you have to go in and you have to fill in those little gaps. Let's say an actor's rolling around on the floor or something. The better coverage you have, the better the data's going to be, quicker to clean up.
What I have right here is the new, the next generation of helmet cams from MoCap Design. If you remember, Daniel Craig was on a few episodes back and he had the older Version 1 helmet. This is the new Version 2 helmet. It's a much nicer design. It's got a 720p camera mounted on the front. We put a little 32 gig SD card on the side, battery pack, plug it in, everything's remote, everything's captured right up here in the back of the camera. This worked incredibly well out on stage.
It does capture audio, but it's low resolution audio. It's good for lining up the performance that you're videotaping with the professional audio that's recorded at the same time. But you want to professionally mic and have a boom operator come in. But no, this is incredible, and it's 3D printed. Most of the parts on there are 3D printed.
We use props like this. Normally they're called blue guns. They're used for military and police training. They're not real. They're made out of rubber. I decided to put an orange tip on it just because we're in a mall area right now. So it's real weight, so you kind of get the actual... we marker it up. Here's the mocap markers, which, if light is directly coming in, it's going to bounce right back out to the camera and glow.
That is the actual weight. So when we build props for actors, anything that needs to have weight, we try to add weight to it. That way you get realistic motion.
There is an amazing amount of work to do. We were talking earlier, it was fraught with problems at the beginning. Day one, nothing worked. I mean, we couldn't even plug in a keyboard without finding out the USB on the keyboard was bent. It's just one of those days. But I'm going to say by the second day, into the second day, we had everything going, everything running. Actors were there performing. It turned out to be a really good shoot.
We don't just do test runs, too. So when we do these tests, we're actually trying to put out content. So we are shooting commercials, we're doing test dialogue for Squadron 42. We're not just doing it to do it.