Using motion capture tech on a horse is a lot like mocapping humans, according to Equinox: Homecoming’s developers, except there’s a million more logistical errors that could pop up.
Former Helldivers and World of Warcraft developers have teamed up on a new multiplayer, open-world horse-riding-management game called Equinox: Homecoming, but since the four legged friends are so central to every part of the adventure, the team decided it needed to mocap every animation.
How do you go about even doing that? “It’s the same way you do with a human,” studio director Craig Morrison told GamesRadar+. “We put them in a suit, and the white balls go on the suit, and the suit that we had, I think it was tailor-made in Ireland, right?”
“Eventually, the actresses and actors were in suits with those helmets and the cameras, and the horse actor was also in the suit with the dots, and dots on the ears,” CEO Colin Cragg added. “Everything had to be built so that it functioned exactly the same for the horse as it did for the people.”
After auditioning a number of different horses, the team settled on the “very calm and patient” Bella, who doesn’t sound like she caused any problems during production. The issues instead came from, well, almost everything else.
“The other element of mo-capturing a horse is, we had to set up a facility in Canada in a barn which was large enough to have a horse to be able to trot, and cantor, and gallop, and us be able to do the capture,” Morrison continued.
Cragg explains that they had about 60 cameras “mounted to the outside of the building,” but the wind would sometimes shake and vibrate the building, “which de-syncs all of the cameras.” So, the team had to build a “secondary superstructure inside the building to prevent the vibration from the weather.”
And as if that wasn’t all enough, the delays from the superstructure and the weather “pushed things late enough into the season” that the team only had three and a half weeks with the actors and Bella in the “outdoor riding arena,” Cragg continued. “Because it was Canada, the temperature dropped to minus 28 degrees, so we had to bring in industrial heaters to get the space up to a level where all the performance capture artists wouldn’t look like they’re freezing to death in the scenes.”
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