Did they do this with woolly mammoths too??? :D

God I cant wait for this game. My PC craves new blood.

Makes me wonder about mo-cap for the opening scene in GTAIV

ot: I love lollipop girl

Bah, do some research and animate it, just take a look at Shadow of the Colossus and see how amazing the horse animations can be. I just finished the Assassins Creed and every time I had to mount a horse I remembered Agro and wondered why the riding was so bland. : P Anyways, I thought motion capture had gone out of style in gaming, is it coming back, or is this just a random case?

Multiplayer is always on the prowl for an interesting angle? Wow! I'll have to check them out some time.

Hm, a part of me wants to say "oh cool, glowing white balls on animals", and another part of me points to Twilight Princess, Shadow of the Colossus, and even Assassin's Creed and go "they did fine without motion-captured horses..."

Yo! Check out the balls on THAT horse, eh! Impressive....

Hopefully it does not flop out like every other MMO I've gotten my mitts on.

The game looks pretty good, and the way the horse moves is amazing. The problem is, I refuse to play MMOs, mainly due to the monthly subscription. It's not the cost itself as much as it's the idea of feeling that you have to play, or your wasting money.

Hah! Looked the clip behind the link, yeah, Mo-Cap it is. Three different movement speed animations that loop over and over, turning has no affect on the steps, etc. All the basic Mo-Cap problems are there, sure you get the steps correct and mesh deforms as muscles moves, but it looks like it's mechanical. Some life and variation please?

This is actually pretty cool. We are one more step closer to platypus and Emu motion capture.

whatever the game ends up doing, however much it ends being teh suk, it cannot detract from the fact that this picture made my whole damn day.

@ara: Are you an animator? Have you ever worked with mocap data vs. hand keying everything? I didn't think so. Mocap is not now, or has it ever been on the decline in the game industry. The issues you point out should have been taken care of by the animators cleaning up the mocap data. Don't badmouth things you obviously lack knowledge of as it just makes you look ignorant.

They would make an awesome horse if those were lightbulbs,you could have turn lights and all.

Finally we know why all the other MMOs failed: their horses did just not look real.

amazing! Horse looks so real. its amzing what these people go thru just to quench our gaming thirsts!

Now all they need to do is hook up with Bethesda and get some tips on how to make some sweet horse armor. Age of Conan: Pimp my Horse edition.

@Ex_EA_Slave: Well, the main issue I see w/ the horse mocap is that it's just a waste of mocap given the relatively few motion states a horse can be in:

- Standing
- Walking
- Galloping
- Turning
- Rearing

Like what myself and others have said, some other games manage to animate horses fine without needing mocap, and for the games which do use the technology, they use it for a larger animation set (e.g., cut scenes, sports movements) where it'd just take too much work to hand-tune.

Then again, technology like Euphoria makes me hopeful that stuff like this doesn't need to be done for future games at all. A large part of the reason why the animation wasn't "cleaned up", as you say, was because it'd take up too much memory to store all the separate animations in an MMO. Simulating biomechanics instead of relying on a preset field of animations will be the way of the future, no question.

After watching the video, it's obvious that they just dumped the motion capture info into the game with little polish and the in-game horse movements look pretty rigid as a result. I'm sure the final result will look a bit better, though. As others have mentioned, Shadow of the Colossus is a great benchmark for horse animations.

It's almost the same problem with the Gran Turismo series and their audio recordings. They may record straight from the actual vehicles, but there are other games out there that have more realistic-sounding engine noise and do less work. It's all about the conceptual way people interpret the motion or sound.

A third example could be animation where the animators have to add in un-realistic stretch, contraction, and lead-in motions to make the audience feel like the motions are ultimately realistic.

@Ex_EA_Slave: 3D artist, though not an animator, only worked little with "cleaned" motion capture data, hand keyed quite a bit. But yeah, animation is not my strong points.

I just remember seeing many examples how motion capture was though to be end-it-all solution when it first started to emerge in gaming and the results were less than impressive. Those horse animations reminded me of it all, not much development has happened if that's something to judge from. I'm not saying you can't make good animation with motion capture, I'm just saying that the Conan clip had pretty much all the reasons you might not want to use it.

From my limited experience, motion capture data isn't the most pleasant to work with, and modifying or blending it with other animations or realtime IK data for good interactive realtime animation requires quite a bit of extra work and CPU power compared to hand keyed animation.

I fully expect that picture to be featured in "Age of Conan: What Went Wrong?" blog posts for years to come.

I read the title, saw the picture, and thought "Conan O'Brien is coming out with a game, cool!"

Then read on and said, "Oh... that Conan..."

neat! I've always hated the way video game horse moved ;_; I was always like "DUDE! horses dont move like that >.> this game is lame!" lol... no really I do say that a lot...

This is how the horse animation in Beowulf was done as well.
I recommend renting the film, but just watch the "making of" features. The intern cleaning up the mocap stage after an "accident" is worth the rental price.

I feel old. All of these comments and nothing about "The Electric Horseman"! I can't look at this picture without hearing Willie Nelson singing "Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys".