Free mocap: brushing teeth, walking the dog, driving

3D artist Anderson Rohr has released a new free set of mocap animations — Everyday Actions Pack 2. It contains 22 clips with a total running time of 7 minutes 50 seconds, and all of them are about everyday routine: the character wakes up, takes a shower, brushes their teeth, has breakfast, reads a book, pets the dog, puts a harness on it and goes for a walk, gets behind the wheel, types at a desk, texts on a phone and joins a video call.

This is a follow-up to the first Everyday Actions pack, which remains the most downloaded product in the artist's library — it has over a thousand downloads.

What's actually in the archive

The animations ship for three skeletons right away, so retargeting won't be needed in most cases:

• Rokoko Default;
• iClone (Reallusion);
• Manny from Unreal Engine 5.

The contents cover three typical blocks: the morning routine (waking up, showering, brushing teeth, breakfast, tidying up), walking the dog in three stages — putting on the harness, heading out, coming back and taking it off — and an office/seated group: typing, texting, talking while seated, a video call, a conversation over coffee. Driving, leaving the house in two variants, walking with a greeting gesture and stretching with a rise come separately.

For an animator, this is above all a saving on connective scenes. Such movements rarely land in close-up, but without them a character in an interior scene looks lifeless, and shooting them in a separate capture session for a couple of seconds of screen time isn't worth it.

Where to get it and what you can do with it

The animations are cleared for use in personal and commercial projects — games, cinematics, 3D and VFX work.

Everyday Actions Pack 2 can be downloaded on Gumroad — the previous releases in the series are there as well.

A free pack a month

Rohr publishes a free mocap set every month. Earlier releases included collections with fitness and workouts, football moves, crowd reactions and cleaning. Beyond mocap packs, the artist has also shown other work — for example, an interactive MIDI controller modeled after the real Behringer UMX610 keyboard.

Why everyday animation suddenly became scarce

The series appeared against the backdrop of a shift in motion capture itself: it has stopped being a privilege of studios with optical stages. Inertial suits and algorithms that reconstruct a skeleton from ordinary video have lowered the barrier to entry to the point where a single artist shoots and cleans up animation at home, then hands the result out to the community. Such libraries used to be assembled mostly by companies; now private authors are noticeably adding to them.

At the same time, large free animation catalogs appear to have slowed down: the best known of them haven't received new content in a long while, and with some of the alternatives the free clips run into licensing caveats that make it impossible to put them into a commercial game without additional terms. Against that background, small author-made packs win on predictability: simple terms of use and a clear list of restrictions save studios time.

There is a second likely reason for the demand. The closer the image gets to photorealism, the more noticeable the falseness in simple actions — a character may fight convincingly yet give themselves away by how they pick up a cup or open a door. Libraries have historically been skewed toward combat combos and locomotion, and everyday body language turned out to be the area where it is easier to take someone else's capture than to key it by hand.

If the monthly releases continue, the community will accumulate a selection of themed sets with identical skeletons. For previz, prototypes and filling out background scenes, that is already a working tool.

Will the third pack gather even more everyday actions — or will the mocap library hit the ceiling of daily life?