Fighting game animations.

Development Character & Animation
1

Can someone please help.Im looking into buying i clone.I making a fighting game, Like Street fighter 5 or Killer instinct.What is the best i clone set up i need to make good smooth animations.

What do i need to buy?? I clone 5 or 6.

Dose the mocap pipe line with the mocap plug in, for I5 or I6 come with the kinect camera USB Cable or will i have to buy that separetly ?.

Im going to import animation into Unreal Engine 4 and use them to set up my fighting game motion.Someone please give me some direction on where to start i have a characters made im just waiting to find the right animation tool.

2

You could always try the Unreal Marketplace. There are some Ninja Animations that would suit your game.

That said, iClone 5 Standard Edition is currently available for free (Reallusion - Page Not Found), so you can give it a try.

3

Hey Cinnik,

Having spent the last couple of years trying to achieve the same thing as you, I’d like to give you some advice.
If you’re going to use Kinect for mocap, you’ll be disappointed with the end result. Kinect v1 has no finger tracking and Kinect v2’s finger tracking is very poor. The animations are unusable for fighting games. Besides, if you only have a single Kinect sensor, you should absolutely avoid this approach.
Every software that allows capturing from Kinect including iClone, Brekel, Motionbuilder plugins etc. will give you unusable animations.
If you don’t care how good your mocap turns out, you could give it a shot, but before spending money, please look up sample videos on youtube. I am obviously no authority, but would like to give you a friendly recommendation NOT to do this.

The best thing you could do right now is wait for the Neuron mocap suits to start shipping and look at the feedback from people. Again, mocap files from Neuron would need a lot of cleanup before they can be actually used for your characters, but Neuron does seem to give some pretty good results.

If you can save up to buy that $1500 suit (i regret missing the Kickstarter), you’ll have a very convenient mocap system (which would still require manual cleaning) that you can use to animate your characters.

The next best mocap solution is probably going to cost upwards of $9000 (Vicon Bonita, Optitrack Flex, XSens MVN) and is very complicated to set up.

If you cannot afford the Neuron suit, you have two options:
(a) Use camera based markerless mocap like ipisoft or Captury (both expensive)
(b) Search for ready-made animations on the web (Motus, Kubold, Motek etc) and retarget to your rigs or
(c) Get hold of a character animator

Personally, we got tired of waiting for the Neuron system so we ended up ‘hand animating’ our characters. Animating characters this way gives a unique style to your game but might not necessarily look realistic. Besides, ‘arcadey’ motions can be very hard to capture anyway so there’s no other option but to get a character animator.

If you still insist on using the Kinect sensor, you should look at iPisoft - the tracking and cleanup is a lot better than other products.

Cheers!

4

I would advise that even if you could easily do it, MoCap would be a terrible choice generally for a fighting game.

Have you ever seen a human being fight? Even very skilled fighters just don’t look nearly as exciting as animated ones. The way the human body moves is not extremely elegant or snappy, as you would expect from a fighting game.

The story I always share about mocap for fighting games is that when the DmC reboot came out, Ninja Theory used their mocap actors for all of the in-game attacks, and Capcom’s supervisory team made them go back and redo them all by hand keying. What looks realistic and what looks “correct” for button-pressing melee combat are very different. A player expects movements which are responsive, which means they are far faster than a human actually fights, and involve far more “holding in an extended pose” type situations. A real human punching spends probably more time winding it up than he does actually punching; a fighting game character does almost no windup and probably holds the pose for a moment with his arm fully extended to visually communicate the specific punch to the player. That means the pose of the punch needs to convey speed and power, which is totally contrary to how a human actually punches.

If you did it with mocap you’d wind up doing so many corrections and tweaks it’d have been faster to hand key it anyway.