Captivated by motion capture Computers can animate a person jumping rope or skipping down the street in several ways. It's probably easiest to use a shortcut called motion capture, which digitizes real-life motions by recording the position of key points like the hands, elbows and knees. Wearing special reflectors, the actor performs before a set of cameras that record the position of each reflector in three dimensions. These positions are entered in a database and later manipulated by software. Very cool animation.
Motion capture is quick, fast, and effective.
This original shows professional swing dancers in action. By mathematically adjusting the position of both dancers, things look lifelike once again. Download the movies here. 2.7MB Courtesy of Michael Gleicher, University of Wisconsin-Madison department of computer science. Some people have tried to fix the problem by altering one frame at a time, but that produces jerky, unnatural motion.