The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Truly Animated : Technology Brings Movement to Cartoons

Motion capture technology--the science of tracking human movement in real time--sounds like it’s quite well suited for the military, which first developed it, or perhaps for ergonomic specialists or exceptionally maniacal bosses.

But it turns out that it is a lot of fun for entertainment too. Indeed, it is cartoon creators, special effects supervisors and video game makers who are now taking advantage of the technology’s ability to bring lifelike motion to animated characters.

The idea is conceptually simple: An actor is outfitted with about a dozen 1-inch-square sensors, and a transmitter emits signals that are reflected back and show the way the actor moves. The information is fed into a computer, and a three-dimensional replica of the moving person appears simultaneously on a computer screen. It’s a technique known in the entertainment world as “performance animation.”

“It brings new life to your characters,” said Ken Kline, director of Biovision, a San Francisco motion capture company. “It’s much cheaper, it’s a lot faster and it gives you subtle nuances you could never get with traditional animation.”

Modern motion capture technology was developed in the 1970s, primarily to create realistic flight simulation programs and for use on other military and aerospace projects. In the late 1980s, the technology crossed over to consumer markets, driven by the willingness of golf enthusiasts to pay $300 to have their golf swings digitally analyzed.

A few pioneers have been peddling the technology to the entertainment industry for several years, but only since last summer has the it caught on.

Motion capture gives cartoon characters the look and feel of living creatures and allows programmers to animate them in real time--a great feature not only for live events such as trade shows but also for television cartoons and commercials.

“The entertainment industry is the No. 1 customer for us right now,” said Tom Knoflick, director of sales for Polhemus Inc., a Colchester, Vt.-based company that sells about 1,000 motion capture systems a year. It costs about $10,000 to rent or about $500,000 to purchase a sophisticated system.

Colossal Pictures of San Francisco used motion capture technology to animate Cartoon Network spokesman Moxy, an orange dog with the voice of comedian Bobcat Goldthwait.

Moxy moves according to the motion of an actor in a sensor-laden bodysuit, although his breathing, blinking and tail wagging are pre-programmed, said Ann Brilz, who headed the Moxy production team.

The Cartoon Network has performed Moxy live on three occasions--an impossible feat with traditional frame-by-frame animation.

Even when taping Moxy for his new television series, the ability to animate him in real time is a tremendous production advantage, Brilz says.

“With traditional animation, you could go for a couple of weeks working on drafts of animation” before seeing how it comes out, she said.

With performance animation, she said, “it’s immediate. We watch it on the computer as it’s happening and revise the performance as we go along.”

Real-time animated characters are getting more sophisticated. One-year-old Moxy has seven sensors; Broz, a newer character created by the Parisian company Medialab, relies on input from 16 sensors on an actor’s head, shoulders, elbows, hands, chest, hips, knees and feet.

“This is really opening the minds of directors--they realize they can do the fairy tales,” said Gerard Mital chief executive officer of Medialab, a French company that has developed a performance animation system for a French TV show.

Broz, a red-haired teen-ager, began life as sketches on paper. Animators drew his body and chose about 30 basic facial expressions that can be strung together to make his mouth move to pronounce words. A sculptor uses the sketches to create a clay model, which is traced with a pen-like stylus to record its three-dimensional shape.

Medialab’s software connects Broz’s motion to that of a sensor-studded actor. A puppeteer provides Broz’s voice and uses computerized gloves to control Broz’s facial expressions with a series of hand motions.

Performance animation is not limited to characters that stand upright like humans. New York’s R/GA Digital Studios used motion capture to make sports cars and gasoline pumps dance like humans in a series of commercials for Shell Oil.

“The systems are going to get better, faster, cheaper and more creative,” said Robert Greenberg, president of R/GA Digital Studios, who expects performance animation to become a common tool in the entertainment world.

“It has real forward momentum right now.”

Interactive software publisher Acclaim Entertainment recently opened a motion capture studio that uses a system based on optical sensors to create realistic animated characters for video games like “Frank Thomas ‘Big Hurt’ Baseball.” The White Sox outfielder spent two days in the studio performing moves for the CD-ROM version of the game, said Allyne Mills, a spokeswoman for the Glen Cove, N.Y.-based company.

Soon, Hollywood will be hiring virtual actors instead of stuntmen, said Joseph Francis, creative director for digital production in R/GA’s Los Angeles office. The animated characters will be designed to look like leading actors yet be able to perform superhuman and dangerous feats risk-free, he said.

That kind of demand is transforming companies like South Pasadena-based SimGraphics Engineering, said Dave Verso, the firm’s chief operating officer.

“We used to be an aerospace company, and now virtually all our business is character animation for entertainment,” he said.