Quote: "I have *never* seen a decent, realistic CG animation that didn't use mocap. The nuances are captured with mocap, something that our brain can instantly pick up on if it's missing."
You'd be surprised actually.
Gollem for example, used MoCap for his basic motion and interaction; but then ALOT of his animation was done by hand still.
Many of to naunces for example are added later by hand.
Square Pictures also did huge amounts of their animation by hand.
Movement was controlled by MoCap, Hands and Faces were animated by key motions and Karma was used to patch it all together to make the motion realistic and interact with the environment which was often rendered seperate from the characters.
I mean don't get me wrong it can save alot of time, and is good for adding certain things.. but with Phsyics engines now being far better due to daily useage and the need for them to be updated on a global market scale rather than custom solutions. MoCap is really becomming fairly obsolete.
Quote: "At the very end, it says physics by Ageia. Meaning it uses the PhysX. Why, when it supposedly has this fantastic Cell processor?"
Perhaps because Aegis PhysX is a Physics Engine and Cell is a processor? Not to mention PhysX is in the hardware, and that hardware is capable of handling more throughput floating-point calculations within the dynamics and collision space passed directly from the graphics card than iirc Aegis saying 100 processors of equivilant speed.
Not to mention that the memory cut-downs in the Playstation3 version of the Cell mean that it's potencial falls damn short of what they advertised and in-fact makes it about on-par with the xbox360's processor. But don't let any of that detract from the real subject here.
