Today I have released some new motion capture dance animations. These were all created with professional dancers. This is a youtube video of one of the breakdance animations captured on the day. There are some other videos in the dance section of this website. I will add more videos over time, but Ive only just launched this new site literally 10 minutes ago. Its going to take me quite a while to get all the products uploaded and demo videos made. In this blog post ive also posted some pictures etc of the day.

Usually I use my own motion capture suit to record animations for SL. I've had the system since the middle of 2005, probably one of the first in secondlife to invest heavily in motion capture technology. This suit has some drawbacks though. The first primary drawback is that I have only one suit so I cannot easily capture couples animations without hireing another suit or a studio with these facilities. The electro mechanical motion capture suits also are not well suited to capturing animations that involve rolling on the floor as they have a lot of wireing, sensors and other equipment attached to them that gets in the way. For these reasons I went down the hire an optical motion capture studio route this time. I have hired dancers before but this time I also decided to hire two professional dancers and a choreographer. They were all amazing and the day was really productive. Here are some pictures.

Elliot and Mandy dancing Hip Hop
We managed to capture some great two person dance motion, I am still working to clean these up further before releasing the animations.

Elliots 'Hand Tricks' breakdance
You can see video of the finished animation in secondlife here.

Mandy doing a sexy dance with a chair.
I've not finished cleaning this animation yet. It had quite a few problems with markets being hidden from the camera making it somewhat tricky. Much of this animation will probably have to have its gaps filled with keyphrame animations.