When Oblivion came out it was a good graphical powerhorse to test current gen systems on. It could bring many top of the line pc's down with it's rich detailed world and massive draw distance and range.

However within this world one thing always stood out, in the opposite direction of how good the world look, the animations were quite limited. NPC's often came across as very "Robotic," there was no real detail to human movements/emotions during events int eh storyline and cutscenes. This took tkhe player a step back and held the game back in terms of visuals. The lack of animation quality was one of the things that stood out the most in Oblivion to many people. Constant forum posts and reviews mentioned how the npc's moved about and the various animations made them look very robotic.

IT was reported a while back, pre-fallout 3'ish that Beth was working on a mocap studio to either buy or build, I can't remember. Is there any news if they will indeed be making use of motion capture for TES V? I really hope that they have at least made use of this for the game. A good mocap/animator can really hlep brin gnpc's to life rather then relying on older animation styles.

I would love to see some mo-cap work done, it could only improve the animation team's resources. Imagine they used a system like http://www.gametrailers.com/video/developer-diary-l-a-noire/708504 for facial animations. :hubbahubba:

Kind of uncanny valley.

if it gets as good as the source engine, that would be fine


the only other problems are with low res textures, the ugly heads and the way the camera zooms in

I don't know about mocap specifically (no one does) but I do know that Todd mentioned in an interview a while back that one of the priorities for their "next game" — which we now know is Skyrim — was to improve animations. So I'm very optimistic that the animations will be noticeably better.

The stuff with L.A. Nore is pretty incredible...

If I recall correctly in a interview Todd (I think?) said they had really improved on their animations and that they always felt that was one of their weakest points.
Maybe my brain is making that up though. Anyone else remember that?

I believe I recall one of the jobs on their website stating a preference for mo-cap experience.

Found it, its for the Technical Artist:

I quite liked Oblivion's anims (character movement & combat, at least - facial expressions aren't as important to me personally), but perhaps part of that was just the sense of relief that they were so much better than Morrowind's.

What the developer says at the beginning of the linked L. A. Noire video -- that animation needs to catch up to, and keep up with the increasing quality and photorealism of art -- strikes very true as well. I hope Skyrim's characters look good and move well. It'd be pretty exciting to learn they've motion captured combat, etc.

Here you go:


http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-08-16-bethesdas-todd-howard-interview?page=2