I'm using Mocap now.
June 24, 2026And i'm doing it with a Kinect.
I know, a bit of a random out of nowhere announcement, but i have my reasons.
Firstly, even though i do love the process of animating Junichiro and Maverick, there are certain shots where even though they are doing simple gestures, it's a total pain in the ass to animate them in the traditional sense. Things like natural looking waves, subtle head movements and tinkering with small objects. It not only looks smooth when done right, but it saves me a ton of time and makes working on animations in the first place a lot more fun.
Secondly, if done right, mocap can look amazing. The key word there is "right". The two big examples most people name off the top of their heads when they think of "great mocap animators" are TheRussianBadger and Hooloopee, but the catch there is that they both have sophisticated enough tech to justify being able to do it. Hooloopee has a VR Headset which he uses from time to time to capture head and hand movements (which you can actually see a behind the scenes cut of for the YouTube cut of "CRASH BANDICOOT IS A DEMON") and TheRussianBadger has a dedicated mocap suit that he records directly into Source Filmmaker to make adjustments to later.
I have none of those. I have a Kinect.
Why do i still think this is a good idea? Simple. Gmod has native Kinect support and Junichiro and Maverick have extremely simple rigs. It's also something that i can choose to toggle between shots. I don't have to make every shot use Kinect mocap if i don't want to.
And the last reason why i want to have a crack at this is because you don't really see anyone trying to make mocap rigs out of blocky characters like Junichiro. I've personally never seen it done before, and it feels like i'd be the only person actively doing this if it ends up working well. I know it's probably going to have it's hurdles. Hell, i'm pretty sure the default stance i'll have to stand at for the rigs to behave is going to look unhinged to any outside viewers, but i feel like it'll be something truly special if i can get it to work.
So yeah, i'm going to be devling into mocap. No idea how it's going to go, but only time will tell.
Also this isn't Project Midway. That's still in development.
UPDATE (from July 6, 2026)
That's a fun idea, Hamm. Shame that the Kinect Gmod drivers don't work on Linux.Why?
Because we can't have nice things.