Behind the Scenes: Martian Animation with Motion Capture

Most of the time, I try to come up with and idea or follow an inspiration and then determine the technique and style to use. But it can work the other way around as well.

Last year, I did a collaboration with Rokoko, the leading motion capture brand offering an accessible precision capture using their Smartsuit product range and Studio software. And the suit was kinda just lying around since then and I always wanted to do something with it, but never found the time.

This time, I forced myself to finally explore some ideas, that would be suitable for this and thought about some sequence I could record while suited up. I came up with an astronaut theme on Mars, going about his day and how that might look like.

Of course, I had to simplify this, make it short and also wanted to make it as a loop animation.

Visit the full Pinboard here

Before I locked in the animation idea, I wanted to explore the possibilities for the environment so I created a Pinterest board and started my search for interesting ideas. I was looking mostly for different space habitat visualizations, astronaut suits and general style I could follow.

I mostly stayed away from a really far-future sci-fi ideas and wanted to create environment that feels at least somewhat realistic. After I had pretty good idea what to create, it was time to think about the layout and how the animation would fall into it.

I sketched out a rough layout of how I would place the buildings and objects and created an L-shaped space for the astronaut to move around. I had to think about how this would be possible to record in my office in one take.

Finally, with the stage, layout and ideas in place, it was to lock in the animation. I imagined a simple scene with the astronaut coming out of the habitat with something in his hands, putting it on the ground to go and adjust the solar panel angle, then just going back. And since it was supposed to be a loop, I had to pick up the item on the way back so the animation can start fresh again.

I crawled into the suit, fired up the Rokoko studio and did few test takes. I had to play around with the elevation tracking a bit, because I wanted to come down a step from the habitat and placed improvised elevated platform in my office. It's amazing, that a simple-use affordable motion capture suit can provide you with even this feature, so there is minimal manual animation work.

After few takes and adjustments in the Studio, I exported the best one as FBX and imported along with the Rokoko character dummy into Blender. That gave me a great framework to build the scene around. I just scrubbed through the animation and placed simple geometry in places where the animation happened until it matched.

Then it was all about modeling the scene and all the details, doing some texturing work and creating an astronaut character to remap the motion data to.

You can watch the process video on Youtube.?

See you in the next one! :)