Everyone’s favorite family of superheroes is back in “Incredibles 2” – but this time Helen is in the spotlight, leaving Bob at home with Violet and Dash to navigate the day-to-day heroics of “normal” life. It’s a tough transition for everyone, made tougher by the fact that the family is still unaware of baby Jack-Jack’s emerging superpowers. When a new villain hatches a brilliant and dangerous plot, the family and Frozone must find a way to work together again—which is easier said than done, even when they’re all Incredible.
In Incredibles 2, crowds of background characters required realistic, natural movement without demanding excessive animation time. Pixar employed Motion Capture to bring these human figures to life, capturing authentic gestures, postures, and walking patterns. This approach allowed the team to populate scenes efficiently with dynamic, believable people, adding depth and realism to the environments while keeping production workflows manageable.
The animators actually started using some motion capture because crowds are hard, as you have to animate, simulate, and render a lot of individual people. It was used for the filming of background humans. Animators themselves directed the motion capture shoots focusing on body motion and not on face and hand motion. Faces are the most nuanced part of character performances and for this reason they were animated manually. Since there is complex shot context with multiple characters, fast and scalable character rigs and an algorithm for real time motion retargeting from human actors onto stylized animated characters were created.
