Hey Dale B,

In my experience, nothing speeds up the creation process as much as I'd hope!  ;-)

Seriously, tho, overall I'd say that mocap does speed things up, but it depends on what you're capturing. Ironically, it does much cleaner tracking with large, continuous or even fast moves than it does with slow, small movements--has to do with the way the cameras track the points. So the upshot is that in a capture with a lot of movement, little stray movements are less obvious, where as in a character not moving much, the noise is more obvious, so, ironically, you spend more time cleaning up a capture with very little movement than you do with one with more movement.

For example, in a scene I'm working on now, I have one character moving about and talking/gesturing at a wall screen, and not only was it faster to animate, but the walking around in this manner (forward and back, turning etc.) would be incredibly difficult by hand. The characters sitting and watching him required a lot more work since they were mostly sitting still (but not completely) until they talked and gestured, so I really have to get rid of the noise.

It's also a bit of an arms race, too--with capture capability, you end up doing more complex moves than you'd have attempted by hand, so you end up moving the goal post on yourself because you can. All that said, I'm really glad I have the capture system, and I'm pleased with how things are turning out in this part of my animation--there's a lot more feeling in the mocap stuff than I ever had in the hand-animated stuff. It's still not perfect--I get the occasional awkward move that I just can't seem to be able to fix without just starting over--but overall I think it's a definite plus, and I 'm assuming I'll get better at it as I go along.

I have an 8 wide-angle camera set up in the corners of a 14'x14'x7.5' space, on mounts screwed into the walls. I started with 6 in a circle, but the capture area was tiny, so I had to go to 8 (which in a 14x14 space gets the cameras more like 18' apart). This seems to do a pretty good job, tho I think I suffer a bit from the low ceiling. Yes, finding that much space is tough--I have to move out the bikes etc. when I capture--but the permanent mounts are nice since I don't have to set up the space and point the cameras every time I use it. That said, there's generally a lot of time between captures--a couple hours of captures can keep me busy for weeks or even months, so in your case, if you had tripod cameras and access to a large space with a cement floor just for a day or two now and again, that could be enough, as long as you plan ahead and make sure you get all your shots at your capture session.