Motion capture: when human performance brings characters to life

Little riddle: what do The Lord of the Rings, Planet of the Apes, and FIFA 2018 have in common?
Correct! Andy Serkis.

Let's talk about motion capture !

Popularized by Andy Serkis in his portrayal of "Gollum" in The Lord of the Rings, motion capture has found another fertile ground to grow in: sports video games.
Let's start at the beginning: motion capture is the process that consists of applying small white markers on the joints of an actor (or here, an athlete) to record, with dozens of cameras, their every move and gestures so as to translate them into the game. More precisely, once motion capture is performed you obtain a "skeleton" that moves with the naturalness of a human. This skeleton will be "dressed" with the physical characteristics of the game's character.

Soccer fans know this, the FIFA games have been using this technology for a long time already. The first FIFA to use motion capture was FIFA 07, twelve years ago.
This technology enables movement realism that's unmatched, but it also saves developers a huge amount of time. They no longer need to create all the animations by hand, which used to take colossal time for their predecessors.
In addition to saving time, realism increases. It is difficult to recreate human movements without falling into the "uncanny valley", this robotics theory that says that the more visually realistic a robot is, the more the small imperfections perturb us. Have you ever felt uneasy looking at a realistic but not-perfect face in a game? Then you've already visited this valley.

Bigben uses this technology for its sports games like Tennis World Tour. For its next game, Spike Volleyball, the indoor volleyball simulation enlisted the Paris studio Black Sheep to capture the various essential technical gestures of Volleyball, such as the spike.

Everything is clear in the video that follows:

But motion capture isn't reserved for sports games, it's quite possible that some of your favorite games have used this technique, so why not have fun finding which ones?

Well-known actors may thus be hiding in your favorite game!