Lead Animator discuses challenges in motion capture for the dog
UPDATE: Infinity Ward has confirmed there was miscommunication and the dog is not named Colin.
Hey everyone, we know there’s some miscommunication about the dog’s name. It’s not Colin, but we will reveal his name at a later date.
— Infinity Ward (@InfinityWard) May 25, 2013
In an interview with EuroGamer, IW’s Lead Animator discussed the challenges that they faced to motion capture the Navy Seal dog.
Zack Volker was asked about the difficulties they faced and he said that it was challenging at capturing the motion of the dog, as this was the first time they are actually doing this:
“For me as the animation lead, [the biggest challenge of Ghosts] was definitely working with the dogs,” lead animator Zach Volker said in an interview given at a demo event a week before the Xbox One reveal, his use of “dogs” suggesting that the dog may have been working with stunt doubles. “We’d never mo-capped a dog before! Working with two-legged characters is hard enough. The session was crazy.”
Another challenge was trying to put the capture tech on the dog, so they had to use a spandex suit and glue the markers on to the suit itself.
“We tried putting these booties on, with the markers glued on those – they were like these little rubber socks,” Volker continued. “We were very excited, we put these things on for the first shoot, we let him go on the stage… but then he’s walking around like he’s on molasses. I thought, ‘We are not going to get a single decent shot out of this whole day.'”
Fans have had much reaction to the dog, with a twitter account, @CollarDuty, gaining over 15,000 followers in 2 days.
As for his in-game name? IW’s Community Coordinator hinted that his name will be revealed soon:
SOURCE: EuroGamer