Thanks for stepping up to the plate yet again to answer our questions. Compared to your earlier work with animal and motion capture for Roughnecks: Starships Troopers Chronicles, how has the technology advanced in the last few decades and are there any drawbacks compared to the earlier methods?asked by MisterCole

Tech's made huge steps since I first started. I mean tech's made huge steps in the last few years. When I did the work on the initial season roughnecks, optical mo-cap wasn't really used in production. I think you had some of the larger film effects companies using it, but I don't think any smaller houses or games were at all. At that point we had a magnetic system, flock of birds I think it was called, staged size was limited to 12×12, 12 feet by 12 feet. It was supposed to be wireless, but it would sense these wireless data packets and occasionally the data packets would drop, which would make the motion completely blow up or freeze so a lot of times we had to run tethered.So you had somebody in these funky suits with all these gyros on them and then even on the software side there was a lot of scripting to get stuff to work. Mapping something, the actual motion to character, it would take a full day to set up a character and get them running when now you can do it now in a couple clicks.Back in the day when we finished stuff and we looked at it, we were so proud seeing characters moving in the environment. When I go back and look at those nowadays, you know you can see the high frequency noise, I kind of cringe, you could see that high frequency noise in the animation, you can see floaty feet, contact isn't really there where it needs to be, but you know that was the day and for the time of what we did I think it was really cool.Today you have huge volumes, you're capturing numerous people at once, you're capturing body, you're capturing face, you're capturing fingers, we're recording audio; we're tracking props, huge volumes if we want to use them. The software is also leaps and leaps and bounds. It's almost to the point to say kids nowadays have it easy, right? But it's true, back in the day it was a lot more archaic, but it was still incredibly new and exciting back then just as the new stuff is coming online now so it's cool.