Each side is wearing Xsens motion capture suits, instead of FUT 22 Coins club colors. In the touchline, teams are hunching over laptops. Production workers are also looking at the tablets that show live metrics. Short-range signalling equipment monitor players' movements down to the millimetre. An animation director watches the events on Zoom from hundreds of kilometers away. This isn't the work of a space age scouting team, nor the latest coaching innovation.
They are the creators of FIFA 22. EA motion-captured for the first time a live 90-minute football game. This enabled EA to track the players' movements on the highest level, which it could then add to its animation database.
The game publisher was looking for the most important details, all the way down to the smallest details including how a fullback hits the ball with their laces, to the way a player's eyes naturally glance over their shoulders prior to receiving a ball. Gareth Eaves (senior animation director at EA) directed the workshop remotely. "Ultimately, realism equals more realistic games." "We have wanted to do it for a long time but the technology just hadn't been there."
EA typically employs actors, optical capture, and sometimes a star footballer such as Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo to develop new animations. It is difficult to swiftly move the ball or transfer the ball from one side to the other in an area of only a few feet. Motion-captured games that are restricted in their play such as keepie-uppies and one-on-one dribbles, need to be transformed by FIFA animators to free-flowing moves that mimic eleven-a-side games.
The cameras have been removed. The motion capture stage has been abandoned. Only the Xsens suits are left. Eaves says that drift was a concern. We knew that the joints of buy FIFA 22 Coins players were relative to each other but not necessarily to each other in space.
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