Motion Made Magic—How Cygames’ Motion Capture Studio Brings Movement to Umamusume
From dynamic dance sequences to intricate gestures, Umamusume: Pretty Derby is packed with detailed 3D animations that bring the game to life. To maintain the quality of these visuals and deliver top-notch entertainment experiences to people across the world, Cygames has established dedicated motion capture teams and studios that conduct all recording sessions in house.
In this article, we take an in-depth look at the formation of these studios, their workflow, and their day-to-day operations, as well as highlight some of the projects they have worked on.
Note: Article based on information presented in “Breathing Life Into Digital Characters—Cygames’ Motion Capture Studio Structure & Project Examples,” a video shown at Cygames Tech Conference. (Website in Japanese)
- CG Artist Team – Motion Capture StudioTakuya
- Joined Cygames in 2019. Responsible for coordinating motion capture sessions, data editing, tool development, and equipment selection on the mocap studio team.
Defining Motion Capture—How Mocap is Used at Cygames
Motion capture, or mocap, is a technical process that involves digitalizing the movements of people or objects.
It is most often used to analyze the movements of athletes in certain sports and to produce CG for films, but at Cygames, we employ motion capture technology to give our 3D characters authentic human movements.
In the beginning, we recorded our mocap sessions in another company’s studio, but as sessions started to become more frequent, we decided it’d be best to open up our own studio to improve both efficiency and quality. So in 2018, we established our first dedicated mocap studio in Tokyo.
Since then, we’ve recorded about 20,000 takes of game actions and dance movements. Along the way we also gained considerable know-how in various filming techniques, developed new tools, and made improvements to our studio environment. The experience has definitely put us in a better place than when we first started in terms of session productivity and caliber.
As of now, we have two motion capture studios: one in Tokyo, and another in Osaka. Generally speaking, the Tokyo studio captures movements for Umamusume as well as videos commemorating game anniversaries.
The Tokyo studio’s recording area is quite spacious, measuring 9m x 16m x 3m, and is equipped with 72 powerful cameras capable of capturing 16-megapixel high-resolution images at 120 frames per second.
Cygames’ motion capture studio in Osaka specializes in recording mocap for console game titles such as Granblue Fantasy: Relink. Read the article below for more about the Osaka studio.
What kind of work does the motion capture team do?
Mocap Workflow
Broadly speaking, the motion capture process is separated into three steps: preparation, capturing, and editing.
1. Preparation: taking care of all tasks associated with pre-production.
Key duties include session scheduling, data preparation, prop selection and production, and brainstorming capture strategies for character movements detailed in storyboards.
2. Capturing: recording the mocap session.
Details for this step are explained in the “Team Structure” section.
3. Editing: processing and editing mocap data.
Key duties include marker data processing, using marker data to transfer movements to different characters through retargeting.
Mocap Team Structure
The mocap team is made up of three parts: the studio team, the actor team, and the project team, with each one contributing something different to the process.
The Studio Team
– Session coordination: directing and communicating with mocap actors
– Session supervision: capturing mocap sessions, monitoring camera systems for potential issues, tracking markers, verifying post-capture data
– Previewing: managing real-time preview controls, operating and positioning cameras, changing character models
– Real-time previewing: applying actors’ movements to 3D character models in real time, replaying and confirming capture data with character models in MotionBuilder
The Actor Team
– Mocap acting: equipping motion capture suits and performing various actions to record the motions needed
The Project Team
– Direction: directing and collaborating with mocap actors to review and finalize captured content (often done by CG designers and game developers)
Here are a few examples of actual productions captured at the Tokyo studio!
Motion Capture Production Example—Capturing Winning Concerts for Umamusume
“Umapyoi Legend” Winning Concert
The video below contains footage of the motion capture session for “Umapyoi Legend” next to visuals from the game. Give it a watch to see how the moves translate in game.
Now let’s take a closer look at some key scenes.
Capturing the Opening Scene
To capture the opening sequence where they race down the stairs, we built a set of stairs using our studio props while referencing in-game visuals for accuracy.
Number of Takes and Running Across the Stage
In all, it took about 20 takes to get this scene correct.
The staircase section and dance parts we captured separately, which is a process we decided to apply to recording the stage running scene and background dancer movements. For the running scene in particular, we had the actors run several times before we got what we wanted.
We also went through several takes for the background dancers to capture as many unique movements as we could.
Mocap for “Umapyoi Legend” was a comprehensive process, and only after recording every part—for the main dancers and background dancers—were we able to create a complete performance.
“Run for Our Dream!” Winning Concert
For this Cymagazine feature, we’ve decided to release never-before-seen footage of the mocap session for “Run for Our Dream!”
Check it out!
Capturing Movements for PakaTube!
The focus of most mocap sessions is body movements, but for the Umamusume YouTube channel, PakaTube!, we capture finger movements as well as facial expressions.
Dedicated Preview Station, Teleprompter Setup, and Camera Configuration
During mocap sessions for PakaTube! we decided to do something a little different and cooperated with the project team to incorporate Unity into our preview station. This allows us to see how the movements we capture look like in game and make adjustments on the fly. Being able to set up a system integrated with the game’s data is one of the significant benefits of having an in-house studio.
For PakaTube! we also record eye movements, so we’ve adjusted the positioning of our equipment to put the teleprompter displaying the script at the same eye level as the camera.
We use the same setup to capture movements for Umayon episode previews.
Watch the final product here. (Video in Japanese)
Mocap Studio Principles and Outlook for the Future
The most rewarding part of this job is being able to contribute to a wide variety of projects, including Umamusume. To give each project the best version of what they want, it’s important for us to always be experimenting and raising the bar.
Here are some of the principles our team believes to be essential in producing high-quality mocap work.
Prioritizing Innovation, Observation, and Consideration
The development team doesn’t always have the knowledge of how props and actors should be utilized to capture the motions they want. To bring their vision to life, we strive to be innovative and think of imaginative methods to capture the movements desired as safely as possible. Below are some past examples of requests that required us to think out of the box.
Skydiving: a movement requested for [Sunlight Bouquet] Mayano Top Gun that simulates using a harness to pull a parachute open.
Falling: a movement requested for Chapter 5 of the main story that we captured by positioning actors face down on top of round stools and asking them to flap their arms and legs.
Breakdancing: a movement requested for [Soirée des Chatons] Seiun Sky that we captured by laying down flooring that made it easier for actors to rotate.
We keep the project team in the loop during every step of the process, delivering to them cuts at various stages of completion and making adjustments depending on their scheduling requirements and specifications.
As a team, we also strive to be observant, monitoring actors’ movements to ensure that they look natural and authentic, while also being considerate of their well-being. The studio team is encouraged to offer actors a break if they notice an actor’s performance shifting due to fatigue. With our quality assurance framework and frequent filming schedule, the studio is the perfect environment for developing these kinds of skills.
Developing Bespoke Tools
We put great stock in developing specialized tools to aid us in our pursuit of quality mocap work.
For example, retargeting—a process that allows us to reproduce identical movements between character models of different sizes—is normally done manually. Due to the project workflow, a given animation often crosses many hands before it’s finished, so we engineered a custom tool to keep the quality consistent no matter who works on it. In this way and more, we are constantly developing things to elevate the standards of the work we produce.
Managing a State-of-the-Art Studio
Our studio is capable of capturing movements as simple as dancing and fighting, to those as unusual as balancing on top of a ball. We do our best to keep our studio outfitted with all the equipment and materials we need to accommodate even the most extraordinary requests.
The amount of space we have and our extensive camera configuration gives us the opportunity to gather incredibly precise datasets from our markers. That opens to the door to interesting and dynamic shots, such as simultaneously recording the full-body and finger movements of multiple actors all in one take.
Going forward, I hope we can find a way to expand beyond capturing and data processing, and explore the full spectrum of possibilities mocap technology has to offer.
And as Cygames is a place where people from different career backgrounds work together to produce the best in entertainment while having fun, I believe the opportunity to branch out is closer than we think.
And that wraps up this article on Cygames’ motion capture studios!
Affiliated Partners:
Casting for motion capture actors provided by SOLID CUBE Co.,Ltd. (Website in Japanese)
This article is a translation of a Japanese article originally published on October 3, 2022.
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