Unreal Engine Creators Showcase Live Motion Capture Technology

Nowadays, motion capture has become a technique commonly applied in the film industry. Utilizing this technique, actors can act as normal, but in the end, their appearance can be completely changed with CGI (computer-generated imagery).

Not a few popular movie characters are born from technique motion capture. One of the most famous is probably Gollum in the Lord of the Rings series, played by an expert actor motion capture, Andy Serkis, who also played Caesar in the Planet of the Apes series and Supreme Leader Snoke in the two most recent Star Wars films.

motion-capture involves a very complex process. Simply put, actors will act while wearing clothes that are fitted with a series of sensors. What is actually recorded is the actor's movements (complete with changes in his facial expressions), before finally being replaced with CGI in the post-production stage.

You can imagine how much time and effort it takes to process a scene shot using this technique motion capture. However, in the next few years, the situation will change drastically, especially thanks to the latest innovations that are the result of collaboration between several big names in the industry Gaming: Epic Games, Tencent, Vicon, Cubic Motion and 3Lateral.

The project they are working on is called Siren. Shown at GDC 2018, Siren is basically a character Interactive created by technique motion capture, it's just that the process takes place instantly, aka real-time. Every time the actor moves his hand or just blinks his eyes, the character will also appear to be doing the exact same thing.

The character itself isyield menggunakan U (made by Epic Games) online real-time at 60 fps, so everything looks smooth, with barely noticeable lags. Unreal Engine 4 also allows an amazing level of detail to the characters Interactiveher (look at her eyelashes), which is modeled on Chinese actress Bingjie Jiang.

The technology behind Siren has actually been developed for a long time, and was used in the main play indie games phenomenal Hellblade. In addition to Unreal Engine 4, the components that make up Siren include technology computer vision design Cubic Motion, which can read more than 200 facial parts at 90 fps, then map the data to the character Interactive automatically and real-time.

Complementing Cubic Motion's contribution is technology facial rigging made 3Lateral, while the movement of the character's own body comes from the system motion capture design Vicon. All of these components work together to create animations that are incredibly realistic, and most importantly, without going through a complex post-production process.

Technology live motion capture This will later be offered to the film industry at once Gaming. Although no official schedule has been revealed yet, Cubic Motion official, Andy Wood, had said that this technology would be universally available in 2020.

The potential application of this technology is clearly very wide, but at the same time it can also be misused. Most troubling, as Engadget imagines, is perhaps when this technology is used to create fake news (hoax), where a video circulated of a famous figure saying inappropriate things, even though the figure is a digital recreation using this technology.

At least in the near future, distinguishing between real people and characters Interactiveit's still easy, but try to imagine if Unreal Engine 5 is released later, and the results yieldit's even closer to the original. This does not mean that we have to be pessimistic about innovations like this, but at least we must be prepared to anticipate the potential for abuse in the future.

Sumber: VentureBeat and Engadget.