If you think motion capture will solve all your character
animation problems, think again. Often it causes
even more headaches.
The shacho and his cohorts are back from E3, and during the Monday morning meeting, they expressed their being impressed by the standards of western developers. According to the shacho, even the best visuals that Japan has to offer looked average when compared to the many western games on show at E3. Western developers have surpassed Japan both technically and visually, but not so much in the aspect of gameplay. The VP of PA used the word "shocked" to describe how he felt about E3.
And "shocked" is also the word I'm using to express how I feel about the current status of our training. While Andrew seems to be getting his money's worth of training in programming, both Ron and I are likely not. At least not for the "advanced" half of our training. One can learn more advanced techniques by visiting game websites and reading GDC notes.
Difficulties
This morning, we received the mocap data captured last week at Hachioji, but the data was not properly cleaned up. It could be that the data was edited by TUT students and they are not fully familiar with the process. Mocap data editing is a very manual and laborious process, as we have witnessed last Friday at the DMC studio.
The concept is simple, but mocap is far from plug-and-play.
Every stage of the mocap process from capture, clean-up to editing
is potentially a very labor-intensive and time-cosuming process.
In any case, there didn't seem to be any proper lesson planning for the "advanced" Visual Art track, even though they have agreed to introduce us to more aspects of the Chidori Engine and the Aoi Engine (which Andrews says is just another shader library).
In the afternoon, we were only scheduled for a Game Design session with Hattori-san. While studying game design is a good bonus, our main purpose is to learn about Game Visuals.
West beats East
I now see why Japan has fallen behind the west. They don't react well to contingencies and deviations from established methodology.
It is apparent that the majority of Japanese game artists do not have enough technical knowledge. Granted they are highly creative and hardworking, but times are changing and they are not adapting fast enough. Perhaps the shacho is aware of this problem, prompting him to start a special R&D project in an attempt to "level up" their development skills.
Perhaps I should switch to learning programming instead.
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