Sony Computer Entertainment Europe's Team Soho has been hard at work creating THE GETAWAY, a highly anticipated game for Sony's Playstation 2 console. In THE GETAWAY the player takes on the role of Mark Hammond, a retired bank robber who is forced back into the world he left to save his son from an evil mobster. To animate the games characters, Team Soho used five motion-capture performers at once, in real-time. Each motion-capture performer wore an Ascension CyberSuit outfitted with 11 sensors and had a separate backpack and receiving base station. The performers also wore Ascensions 5DT Inc. 14-sensor data gloves to capture their hand movements. Game creators were able to map motion-capture data from all five performers -- plus the ten 14-sensor gloves -- directly onto the character models, which were created in Alias|Wavefront Maya. For in-game character animation, the team used Kaydara FiLMBOX to clean motion-capture data from the Ascension system for direct export to the Playstation 2. A large wooden MoCap stage was built outside London to accommodate the performers. Real actors were used for the production because Team Soho wanted to capture their speech along with their movements. The simultaneous tracking of the five performers, incorporating over 50 specially built wood props such as cars, trucks and weapons, was accomplished using Ascensions DC magnetic system. In development for three years, THE GETAWAY production required 30 days of motion-capture and is expected to be released early next year.
