Recently, the TechAnim team at CA have taken ownership of the motion capture studio, which has allowed me to learn more about the Vicon camera system and overall mocap pipeline. It's been fascinating to delve into the more tangible side of animation, with physical props to play with, and physics problems to overcome.
It kind of feels like a strange arcane magic, blessing a large room by waving a stick with LEDs on it in order to 'calibrate' a room, placing markers on a person and getting them to do a hula-hoop movement in order to 'calibrate' a person.
And then at the end of it, you get a load of animations that albeit needs rework, but ultimately has saved weeks of time with tons of tasty secondary motion that would have been near impossible to hand-animate. Pure magic!
