Awesome Dog Mocap - Who Are We?

A little bit about us!

Welcome to our website and online store! My name is Jim Clark. I am the owner of Awesome Dog Mocap. We are a very small team. Basically two people and the actors/dancers we hire. We create motion capture animations for use by 3D Artist and Game Developers. Until recently our studio was based in Edinburgh, but we have now relocated to East Sussex in England.

The motion capture data cleanup and most of the other content on this website has been undertaken by myself. I got involved with  motion capture about 15 years ago when I wanted to create realistic animation content for avatars in the online virtual world 'Second Life'. Our virtual world brand is 'Abranimations®' and is still in full operation today.

Over the past ten years through this work, we have recorded all sorts of motions, from dance through to full locomotion sets as well as random gesture animations. Our library of data has grown and is now pretty big! We are frequently asked if we could provide our data for use on other platforms and in other formats. This has not been easy as up until a couple of years ago the data we captured we processed specifically for the original target platforms. The data was generally not in a suitable format for wider distribution. However, we have now set up our online store and are in the process of working through our library of raw data processing it for use in the wider 3D Art and Game Development community.

What are we offering on this website?

Our site includes an online store of stock motion capture. Our initial release set of motion capture data includes a range of dances and gesture / action animations. We will be working hard to process more of our content over time and will be creating some brand new motion capture animations long the way. If there are any specific animations you would like to see or have any other questions please feel free to drop us a line.

Aside from our motion capture library we will also be creating a series of tutorials to help people use our data, and motion capture in general. At the time of writing we are not currently offering any customer motion capture service, however we may restart this in the future. If you have purchased an animation set but do not know how to retarget it to your own skeleton we are at a fee available to do this for you. please contact us if you wish to find out more.

About our online motion capture store products

The data we have available for sale on this website (as well as the free samples) is in FBX format. We have retargeted them to our standard android character and cleaned them up to a professional standard. Where it has made sense to do so, we have also looped the animations. The data is intended for experienced animators who are able to retarget the data and adjust it to fit there own 3d characters. The free samples should help if you wish to test our data in your animation pipeline before purchasing our 'For Sale' content.

Additional Format Conversions

Whilst the FBX data is the primary format of our products, we have also included a variety of supplementary formats (FOR FREE) with the main files when purchased. This is to help customers get up and running quickly with a number of different applications. The retargeting process can be tricky so we figured this may help in some situations where customers are unsure how to convert the data or do not have the time to do so.

Originally we were not going to include these files at all but decided it would be beneficial to many of our customers if we did. Given the additional work and time involved to produce them, we considered selling them separately. However as we pondered our options, we decided  to focus our efforts on building the core library, but still provide some format conversion assistance. As a result we are offering supplementary converted content essentially as 'Free Bonus' material with the purchased FBX files. The data has been retargeted and converted into a variety of formats, but please bare in mind that as I do not have the time to check and adjust all these formats with great precision they may require some additional work before they are ready for use. The formats we include in the supplementary files may vary depending on the products. Generally they include iClone .rlmotion, 3DMax biped, Daz3D bvh (Genesis, Genesis 8, Victoria4 characters) and a special FBX file we have retargeted for Unreal Engine to facilitate easy import, these files also include root motion.

 

 I hope you enjoy using our website and find out content useful.

- Jim Clark
CEO Awesome Dog Mocap