Keyframe or Motion Capture? Reflections on Education of Character Animation

Abstract

In character animation education, the training process needs diverse domain knowledge to be covered in order to develop students with good animation ability. However, design of motion also requires digital ability, creativity and motion knowledge. Moreover, there are gaps between animation education and industry production which motion capture is widely applied. Here we try to incorporate motion capture into education and investigate whether motion capture is supportive in character animation, especially in creativity element. By comparing two kinds of motion design method, traditional keyframe and motion capture, we investigated students’ creativity in motion design. The results showed that in originality factor, keyframe method had slightly higher performance support for designing unusual motions. Nevertheless, motion capture had shown more support in creating valid actions in quantity which implied fluency factor of creativity was achieved. However, in flexibility factor, although motion capture created more emotions in amount, keyframe method actually offered higher proportion of sentiment design. Participants indicated that keyframe was helpful to design extreme poses. While motion capture provided intuitive design tool for exploring possibilities. Therefore, we propose to combine motion capture technology with keyframe method in character animation education to increase digital ability, stimulate creativity, and establish solid motion knowledge.