Am I crazy or is the mocap bad?

[Intern Waffle]

This has been bugging me since the game came out.

Scenes with lots of movement look very weird. Even scenes in dialogue just plain look weird. I'm very aware I'm watching a 3D model puppeted by a camera watching a human move. The movement is simultaneously stiff and fluid- stiff in the places it shouldn't be, and fluid in the places it shouldn't be. Minor movements feel exaggerated. The position of the limbs and body feel stuck in place in scenarios where they shouldn't be, because full body movements aren't reflected- so an actor moves their body naturally, but then this is translated into an animation that doesn't move naturally, creating a bizarre uncanny valley where the arm is absolutely LOCKED IN to the shoulder position, when the actual actor's shoulder was moving fluidly through 3D space.

It makes these things look almost dated IMO. Would look so much better with bespoke, hand-crafted animations...or motion capture used as a BASE for the animations. Instead, it really looks like they just pasted mocap into the game and then told the characters to stand stock still for every scene.

I really think it just looks terrible. The overall animation, no- but the small movements they try to emphasize with the close-up dialogue scenes, they look so weird. I think it looks very cheap- because it is. Motion capture is easier than actually having good animators animating things.

For all the time and budget this game had I think this is its weakest visual element, ESPECIALLY, again, with how up close and personal the camera is for these things.

[Niklasbane(PM)]

I've always thought a lot of the character animations were either very exaggerated or stilted, kinda like watching a theater performance from up close, so you're not just crazy. In particular is Tav themself imo, including the origin characters if you play as them, tend to look like they're a bit... "simple"... with the way they're animated and never talking.

That said, I don't think it's a big deal, as much as I'd love higher quality.

[Chroniver]

I can sorta see where you're coming from with some of the close-up details. They can be exaggerated at times.

But I don't agree that it looks terrible. To what are you comparing it then exactly would be the question: 99% of RPG's out there look far more flat or lifeless than BG3 if they have a similar close-up.

Just look at Starfield and compare that to this game.

There are a few examples, notably Cyberpunk, that look much better than BG3.
But the budget of Cyberpunk (436 million) and BG3 (around 100 million) is incomparable, with this game also having a ton more permutations than Cyberpunk, which doesn't really branch much.

It could always be better yes. They clearly did an enormous amount of mocap, which you can see in their dev diaries. I don't think making it even better would be such an easy fix though.

[⎛⎝ Kupo ⎠⎞]

It's inconsistent, some scenes are really good especially big ones but others are kinda derpy.

[wtiger27]

I don't think you are crazy and I don't think the motion capture is bad.

I look at any game overall. They all have some flaws, but it is how good is the game overall that is important. And BG3 is just a awesome video game. I don't waste any time nick picking it.

[Intern Waffle]

Originally posted by Chroniver:

But I don't agree that it looks terrible. To what are you comparing it then exactly would be the question: 99% of RPG's out there look far more flat or lifeless than BG3 if they have a similar close-up.

That's the thing, though- I think stilted hand-made animations look better than janky motion capture. It's the uncanny valley. A video game looking video gamey is fine, it's expected. A fluid real world movement stunted down into a motion captured body stuck in one spot is very weird.

Oblivion's dialogue animations are awful by modern standards, though the mouth movements were pretty good for the time. And I genuinely think I'd prefer something closer to that than what BG3 does! You either have to go big with motion capture or not do it IMO.

It just brings into focus how stilted the scenes are in general, with each character told "stand on this X on the ground and don't you DARE move an inch from it" but then told to do acting like normal. So you get things like Astarion trying to do these fancy pretty boy sweeping body gestures with his sarcastic body language while he derides you for caring about the wellbeing of a sad orphan...but he does it all with his feet glued to the ground, so he's doing these bizarre in-place half-bowing motions to swing his arm across the screen.

Compare to the much more remedial motion capture of a game like Final Fantasy X! It looks significantly better despite being much goofier.

https://youtu.be/QmLKMYMIOrI

I guess at the end of the day the issue is that dialogue scene are all a cookie cutter format with the same exact camera angles every single time.

[superslayer]

I've not really noticed it, like I mean then again I played New Vegas for 1000+ hours and Kotor 1 and 2 combined for about the same. So I might have built a massive resistance.

[Safebox]

To be honest, I thought a lot of it was hand-animated with some of the more complex movements being mocapped. It does have a Disney / 12 Principles of Animation vibe to it.

[Worlord]

At least each character has their own movements. They're not all cookie-cutter.

[@%thesock10150alpha49]

Yes in the sense that it's not perfect and there are better examples out there, no in the sense that it's still better than 90% of the garbage out there. Some of which was designed specifically to look good with animations.

[Wuorg]

Yeah, it is kind of a tricky thing to evaluate. On the scale of every other CRPG out there...BG3's mocap is absolute cinema. It does falter when you compare it to the best video games have to offer, but really, you have no idea how bad it can get if the animation in BG3 bothers you lol.

It also helps to keep in mind the limitations and issues a dialogue system like the one BG3 uses has. New Frame Plus has a great take on the subject in his video about Mass Effect Andromeda: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmLPpcVQFJM

[Ereghor the Enigmatic]

Yes, it is terrible, in fact.

The mo-cap itself isn't even that awful (the animations can be rather well done), but the modelling and rigging make it look quite bad. All the close-ups reveal a hell of a lot of things going wrong with clipping, breasts on women collapsing onto themselves at certain model bend angles and in general defying (and lacking) physics, facial animations being either too stilted, or, indeed, to over-the-top.

While I can appreciate the effort of trying to make as many bespoke animations for things as possible, the syncing issues and the troubleshooting required also grow proportionately (and, knowing Larian's... finesse - exponentially, perhaps) - so having somewhat standardized but well-flowing and occassionally surprisingly refined animation work instead (ME1 and 2, DA:O and DA2 come to mind, meanwhile ME3 is a jankfest and Inquisition suffers from the same issues as BG3 in that department) seems like a better option. And all the high-budget JRPGs out there are simply on another level, and comparing this to them feels like pitting a caveman against a tank or something.

The camerawork is probably the worst offender, actually - you can tell they have no real experience with perspectives and shots. Especially the supposedly dynamic scenes all manage to look very... static, ironically, because the direction just isn't there.

And I'd rather not get started on the romance scenes. They're downright embarrassingly poorly done for all the focus they've allegedly gotten. One cannot possibly look at, say, Haarlep's scene and think it's either visually or directionally well-made, or at least decently made. It's the epitome of "two dolls humping".

At the end of the day, it's all visual fluff anyway - all the more reason to be baffled by the sheer degree of wrongness if they chose to pursue that direction in the first place instead of keeping the visuals tastefully simple (like in their previous games).

[Irae]

think about it like this: the game is an rpg with thousands of little interactions and you have to mocap them with a set amount of money and time spent on each one. having them be the same level of quality as games with mere 30h of length is just not feasible.

[Maj. Grumpy]

The mocap is so good in this game, I cant even play another game with rigid, wooden NPCs. Larian definitely set the standard.

[slime]

The mocap is incredible in this game. Miles way way beyond other games.

also if this whole thing had bespoke animations in place of the ridiculous number of unique mocap dialogs and actions with the same quality, along with maintaining the quality of the rest of the game, it would probably would've taken a team this size 20-30 years to make

[Cass]

The mocap is great... for a CRPG. But not for a AAA cinematic game of this era.

I don't find it to be a big deal, but then I've never really cared much about that sort of thing. I didn't find Horizon Zero Dawn's dialogue animations to be as distracting as many people apparently found them either.