Gauging Interest in Affordable Custom Motion Capture for Unity

Unity Engine
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Hello all, we’re interested in gauging interest in affordable custom motion capture in the Unity community. There seems to have been some attempts to offer similar service in the past, but the price point of custom motion capture has appeared to be a bit high for the average unity developer. We’d like to change all that. We have an (relatively) inexpensive medium volume motion capture setup that can be used to capture high quality multi-actor motions. The question is, is there enough (any) interest in such a service here among unity developers? There are some fixed costs associated with motion capture, and so it will never be dirt cheap, but we believe that we can deliver very acceptable custom re-targetable motions at an price point that may interested people around here. We would aim to deliver clean custom actor motion capture for less than the price of generic motions from the big guys on a per-animation basis.

There would essentially be a number services that people could engage:
Custom raw motion capture
Mocap cleanup services.
Keyframe finger animation (the system we currently employ can capture head/hand movement, but not digit articulation; mocap gloves be expensive!).
Facial mocap/lip-syncing, either bone-based or using blend shapes.

Custom Raw Motion Capture
Custom mocap would be charged at a per-clip rate, with a base charge for studio time, setup and calibration, actor, etc with a daily minimum. We would ask the client for a storyboard and/or live action video of the requested motions, the model that the motions would be intended for (in order to help minimize self intersections) and additional technical details. The resulting files would be raw mocap dumps in FBX, relatively clean, but requiring cleanup for production (somewhat like the Unity mocap examples on the asset store).

Mocap Cleanup Services
This service would engage an animator in scrubbing through the motion capture data and cleaning it up for production, fixing occlusion, smoothing and polishing animations. This essential step would be charged per second of finished animation.

Additional Keyframe Animation
Also charged per-frame of finished animation, custom key framing (for example for fingers) can be done during cleanup or separately. This would also be a time to animate things that cannot be accurately captured during motion capture: slowing down the swing of a soldier’s torso to make his tactical vest animate more realistically with apparent weight, etc.

Facial Motion Capture
Charged as a separate service, facial motion capture can utilize Unity 4’s blenshapes to realistically bring characters to life with expressions, lip-syncing and full blown cutscene quality animation in-engine. Combined with full body motion capture, facial animation goes a long way towards creating believable characters. Much like full body motion capture, facial animations need to be storyboarded and acted by experienced motion capture actors who know how to get the right level of expression into your digital models.

We will be deciding whether or not to go ahead with offering these services to the community in the coming weeks, so please respond if you’re interested, as the perceived level of interest will play the determining role in deciding if we move forward or not. Pricing is not set yet, but we can confidently say that we will be the least expensive option out there for custom motion capture, so if you like, respond with the price range at which you would be interested in motion capture services.

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I think you’ll get a lot of non-repeat customers lured by the low cost of raw mocap who will end up disappointed by the amount of cleanup required to make it actually work in a project. But you might be able to flip some them into cleanup customers. The different tiers (raw, cleanup, etc.) is a great idea.

Lack of finger capture is a big issue. Second only to faces, hands are the keys to nonverbal communication. If people are requesting custom mocaps, it’s probably because they need to convey specific expressiveness. I don’t think people are going to want to pay extra to shake a fist or beckon with a finger. And, in a practical sense, how will you capture basic actions such as holding a sword, firing a gun, or shaking hands with another actor? Maybe you can have a library of generic keyframed hand clips, such as “holding” (e.g., a sword, a cup) that you can apply to mocaps at no extra charge, versus custom keyframing for each mocap.

Have you considered offering voiceover to complement facial mocap? I already have a mocap and facial capture studio (so I’m really just replying to share my thoughts having worked with this stuff), but even I would be interested in a one-stop shop for polished, professionally-acted voiceover with facial capture – maybe at $30-50 USD per minute depending on the quality of the acting. If you don’t have voice actors in house, you could probably outsource it to a service like http://voicebunny.com/.

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Thanks for the reply TonyLi. You’re right on the money.

Mocap cleanup is a necessity, anyone not familiar with motion builder or the like would almost have to let us or someone else do the cleanup for them.

Finger capture is hard, even for big expensive mocap rigs. A single cheap mocap glove is ~$20K. Adding finger capture would drive the price far beyond what most people here would be willing to pay. We would probably work with generic actions to make keyframing fingers easy and therefore fast and cheap, but flexible enough for custom work too of course.

The voiceover idea is a great one. The only real limitation is finding a good base of voice actors that are willing (able) to work within the technical limitations of facial mocap. For facial mocap without voice acting you can use a couple of good people that understand how to work with the system, for voice acting I find it is always best to capture the voice actor live if possible (instead of trying to overdub a different facial actor onto a vocal track), so that means training new actors. But still a really good idea.

Thanks for the feedback.

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Even just the option of getting the rig with fingers open, fist, or holding-something position would probably satisfy most uses.

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I would be very interested in this servive if you were to provide it

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I would appreciate feedback on this tentative pricing scheme.

So, it’s been considered, and the pricing scheme for custom motion capture looks like it would come out to $15 per animation for raw movements converted to fbx. Recorded in the studio, by a specialized actor, unique to your project and guaranteed not to be resold (today we had a male gymnast and parkour practitioner jumping all over the place and got some really cool stuff). By raw I mean cleaned up from the complete noisy mess that is raw mocap data, but not production ready. At this price, customers could even choose from one of a library of static finger poses (thanks TonyLi!) for that animation (hands flat, hands relaxed, holding, etc.). If our customers have experience with an animation suite they could stop there.

Extra cleanup, looping, and tweaking would be charged hourly, but would likely run from $5-$10 per motion depending on the complexity.

Some caveats:
A motion is one move, a turn in place 45 degrees looping animation would qualify, so would a run, so would a jump to ledge grab. A turn 45, run to wall, jump, grab ledge, pull oneself up is not one motion by this definition.

There would be a minimum. It was seriously considered to make people purchase our services at a daily rate. This has worked in the past. I feel like this is not the route to go for indie developers who may not need to spend $1500-$2000 for the 100-125 animations recordable in a (long) day. Instead, we would offer blocks of 20 animations to developers here, and shoot for the day when we had filled the schedule for that setup. A day would be determined by the space necessary, the setups required (calibration and setup takes 2+ hours), and the actor required (I’m not going to make the martial arts expert come in for an hour on his day off to shoot for me, he would win in a fight). If you wanted your stuff in a hurry you could just book the day, or what was left of it.

We would charge 1/3 down, and do re-shoots without a minimum for 25% off at the next available shoot, though we do shoot multiple takes so most people find they like at least one of them.

Available so far for props we have:
A variety of assorted boxes to climb, vault, jump over, etc.
tumbling mats.
Some parkour stuff.
A climbing wall to capture on.

So far actors include:
A martial artist.
Male and Female gymnasts.
rock climbers.
firearms expert.
looking for a medieval style weapons expert. Will have to train.

Considering that lots of places are selling stuff at $25 per for generic animations that you will see in a lot of games we feel like this would be a good deal for folks here, but let me know what you all think, I’m curious if people find the pricing encouraging or not so much.

If people are still unsure about what I mean by raw animations I can post an example.

Cheers.

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So that would be about USD $15 + $7.50 average cleanup = $22.50 per motion for most customers, or $450 for a block of 20. Seems like a good deal for an indie studio, but maybe out of the range of many individual hobbyists. I think what you have going for you are actors who can perform physically complex motions and props to perform them with. So you’d charge the same for, say, a fancy dance loop as a simple head nod? Could you facilitate pooling customers together into a 20-motion block? If I need 10 motions, and someone else needs 10 motions, could you arrange for us to group-purchase a single 20-motion block? Can you capture two-person interactions? If so, how would you charge them?

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Thanks for the questions.

One of the problems with facilitating group buys is that things get exponentially more complex administratively dealing with multiple buyers for something that is already time-consuming. We definitely don’t want to get single animation purchasers, as that will become much more trouble than it’s worth. It’s possible that we could work with 10 animations at a time though, at least at first until we find out if managing it is going to be too cumbersome.

As to complexity, it’s a difficult question. We wanted to have a set price and not have things arbitrary for people coming in with pricing on a per-project basis, but we do need to account for the amount of time it will take to capture and clean everything. That’s where the idea of per-motion charges comes in. We’re not going to count a looping waltz as one motion I don’t think, so that’s how move complexity will be accounted for. A head nod is one motion, but most of the more complex moves are actually multiple motions. IE. The parkour jumps we did yesterday involved running into and out of various vaults. The customer can choose to just take the actual jump from when the actor leaves the ground to when he lands as one move, but in a video game situation you often want the lead in and lead out animations, instead of trying to do it with blending, so more often than not complex moves will be broken up into multiple motions. Hopefully that addresses your concern.

As far as multi-actor setups, for the time being we’ll probably just not offer it, because the cost and complexity would be significantly higher. We’re using it for our internal projects, so when we get to a point that we’re comfortable with the process and our actors are a little better at choreographing for two person motion capture we’ll open it up. For video game purposes it’s just as easy and in many cases preferable to capture sword fighting or hand to hand with a dummy target. The pricing would be much different for multi-actor setups, you would have to block out a significant number of moves, and it would be ~$40-$50 per motion. It’s much harder to choreograph, track, process, cleanup and get a good final product that works with your specific requirements in mind with two people, and more than two is a nightmare.

edit: it’s looking like we may be able to get our hands on a foam pit for cool falling, aerials, and long jumping takes that aren’t possible on the ground or with a crash mat, could be very cool.

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sounds like great ideas. What kind of martial arts expert do you have on hand? I am currently working on a fighting game and could use some motion captured animations to help me as I hand animate the moves. Also can you offer biped or bvh format for 3ds max this would be very helpful to me and many 3ds max users who would like to have some editing control over the animation after it is purchased. I wouldn’t mind spending a couple hundred for a block of animations. I hope you can provide this service soon.

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@ jaelove:

The guys I’ve been working with do Kendo and Shotokan karate. I’ve got a line on a guy who is more of a generalist, he does Brazilian Jujitsu and more UFC type stuff is my impression. There are a couple of guys I’ve been meaning to get in touch with that do Enshin Karate, Aikido, Xingyi Quan, and kickboxing. They all teach at the same place. It takes half a day or more to train guys how to act for motion capture and do some takes to show them what they are doing wrong, but I’d love to get more people on board, so if you have a specific discipline in mind let me know and I can look around. Unfortunately I can’t call them all in and pay them for a few hours to shoot just a little bit of each discipline, so we would have to settle on an actor and find some other people interested in martial arts animations to make it doable.

Bip or BVH is perfectly doable, pretty much any common animation format is possible, FBX is just the default because it’s so common and works so well in game engines. If you’ve got experience animating this is really a good service I think, because mocap gives you a nice template to tweak and smooth off of, depending on the end product you have in mind, with keys on every frame @ 60fps you can choose what to keep and what to dump pretty easily.

If you want we can talk and I can put you down for a block of martial arts movements, then we can go about finding some other folks to help fill up the space. Deposits wouldn’t be due until we were ready to shoot so there’s no investment until it’s go time.

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Oh, and one other thing.

By default, animations in FBX would be retargeted to your character if you so desired. Though, of course, through the miracle of Mechanim, they could be mapped onto any character. Another thing you don’t get from the big guys: retargetable animations in your choice of format, not character locked .anims.

We ask for a copy of the model that you intend the animations for in order to get a sense of character and attitude, how the character is supposed to move, and what potential intersection problems we can work to minimize in the studio so that you have to pay for (or do yourself) as little as possible in cleanup. Of course you don’t have to give us one if you don’t want, but it helps the process, otherwise we’ll animate for the unity guy model.

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Ok I will pm you in a little while for more inf.o I really don’t have a specific discipline in mind because I have so many characters there are many styles in my game I will try to give you video clips of moves I am trying to replicate

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I find your pricing to be quite attractive. I doubt I’d use it for my hobbyist stuff, at least in the short term, but it’s definitely something I’d consider for my professional stuff. Having said that, fully character animation isn’t something that we currently have a significant demand for.

Personally I’d see this more as a fantastic augmentation to something like a Mixamo-based pipeline. With a subscription they’re really cheap, players aren’t going to care (or notice) that you used a run cycle from a library that other games also used (especially since they’re mixable), and for the majority of a game’s development you wouldn’t need any more than that anyhow. However, Mixamo and so on aren’t really in a position to make custom animations on demand, and when you’re in the polish phases of a game you’ll commonly need that scene-, character- or scenario-specific stuff to really sell it.

To be honest, my concern is that you might be under-pricing it. $30 for something that (at least) two people are working on? Assuming you’re offering a reasonable quality service that’s great value. (On the flip side, if the quality isn’t up to player’s expectations then there’s little value here at all.)

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@angrypenguin: I share your concerns re: potentially under-pricing. There are actually four people involved in the process: two engineers, an animator, and an actor. If everyone decides to go with mixamo for their simple animations and only comes to us for the hard stuff we’re probably going to have to turn those jobs down at this price.

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Isn’t that “hard stuff” your main competitive advantage, though?

Or to put it another way, if I was thinking about spending money on animations, what could you do or say to convince me that spending money with you is better value than spending it on a Mixamo subscription?

Or, how would you price the “hard stuff” that I mentioned above?

Even for the “easy stuff” I suspect that you’re under-pricing if there’s 4 people involved. Lets say it takes 15 minutes each per animation, that’s charging $30 an hour. Depending on where you are in the world that’s pretty darn cheap for specialist skilled expertise.

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@angrypenguin:

Penguins aren’t angry, they’re just cold, and hate wearing suits all the time.

To the mixamo question, at the lower pricing tier those are .anim files and I believe character locked. And they aren’t custom in any way shape or form. These would be done to your specs (and more importantly your mesh to minimize unwanted intersections), unique, and are re-targetable. For the $1500 that it costs for a mixamo full subscription you could animate most games at these prices with more specialized stuff. It would be your call.

As to the ‘hard stuff’ the thing for us would be that hopefully it would average out between someone wanting an idle animation and someone wanting a jujitusu throw. Plus, cleanup is hourly, and mocap data is a mess with anything too fast or complex, so that jujitsu throw animation might cost you $30-35 by the time it’s cleaned. Of course, if you’re doing that part yourself, you’d still be looking at a pretty damn good deal. I just got rid of the animator I was working with, so I’m going to have to find a new one, and therefore the pricing of cleanup is subject to change. I suspect that, like myself, the last guy enjoyed this stuff a little too much and was therefore willing to do it inexpensively… but we’ll see.

You’re probably not wrong on the pricing, that $30/hr (and it winds up being less than that, believe me) doesn’t include the overhead. Prices may well double after the first shoot :wink: we’ll have to see if anyone is interested first. We have a couple of projects to keep us busy for the immediate future and I have my game to work on in the mean-time.

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Oh, I’m not angry in the slightest. :slight_smile: Though I do wonder sometimes if my username gives people the wrong impression about how to interpret things I say.

I’m trying to give you feedback, not to sing praise for other services, so on the topic of Mixamo I’ll just say that your impressions aren’t quite right and if you’re going to compete with them it’s worth being a little more familiar with their offering.

My intention wasn’t to devalue your offering or anything along those lines. It’s just that, for the most part, I expect that people will get their idle animations and other common things from existing solution providers, and if you guys provide this service they’ll use it to fill the gaps left after that. Certainly as a potential customer when I read what you are thinking about offering my thoughts went straight to the “hard things”, since they’re the things I don’t already have access to. Being able to get a custom idle animation isn’t much of a turn on for me, but context specific or unique scenario animations? Quite possibly.