While the Hellblade demo was impressive, it was far more choreographed than the initial presentation made it seem. But, back then, there was a lot more that went into the production behind the scenes to get everything prepared to get to the point where it was real-time." "That real-time live demo that they did actually at Siggraph was unbelievable they did one at GDC too. " Hellblade was phenomenal," Ovadya says. At Siggraph and the Game Developers' Conference, the studios demonstrated how their technology worked and how it was finally available at a reasonable price for smaller teams, not just billion-dollar AAA powerhouses. Ninja Theory partnered with Epic Games, Vicon and a handful of other companies to create a live mocap demo that showed off the accessibility and real-time fidelity of the latest technology, and they took it on tour. Hellblade is a powerful, award-winning action game from independent developer Ninja Theory, and in 2016, it served as an introduction to the modern world of motion capture. That last title holds a special place in mocap history. "Back then, there was a lot more that went into the production behind the scenes." Vicon provided the mocap systems for a handful of blockbuster films, including Titanic, Marvel's Avengers universe, Paddington and Ready Player One, and games including Life is Strange and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. Think of the company as a one-stop shop for mocap rigs, offering everything from cameras and sensors, down to the actual software that turns all of that data into a digital image, in real-time. Vicon has been in the mocap business for more than 30 years, established in Oxford, UK, in 1984 (and surely making George Orwell sit straight up in his grave). "We've definitely come a long way, especially because everything is automated now," says Jeffrey Ovadya, sales director at Vicon. It was nearly as painstaking as rotoscoping. But even in the 1990s, each mocap-ready camera was roughly the size of a small refrigerator, and animators had to manually assign each marker, in each frame, for every scene. This was a rudimentary rig - the animated actor was essentially a glowing stick figure - but it marked the first instance of real-time motion capture.īy the 1980s, animators were using bodysuits lined with active markers and a handful of large cameras to track actors' movements, resulting in digital images with much more detail and precision than Harrison's radioactive line drawings. In 1959, Harrison lined a bodysuit with potentiometers (adjustable resistors) and was able to record and animate an actor's movements, in real time, on a CRT. Two decades later, the United States was caught in the Cold War, racing the Soviet Union to the moon, and animator Lee Harrison III was experimenting with analog circuits and cathode ray tubes. Though actual mocap systems were still decades away, rotoscoping was precisely the proof of concept the field needed - clearly, it paid off to mimic real people's actions as closely as possible in animated spaces. The first full-length American film to use rotoscoping was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which debuted in 1939, and Disney used the technique in subsequent films, including Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty and Peter Pan. The technique produced fluid, lifelike movements that animators couldn't achieve on their own. In the rotoscope method, animators stood at a glass-topped desk and traced over a projected live-action film frame-by-frame, copying actors' or animals' actions directly onto a hand-drawn world. Rotoscoping was a primitive and time-consuming process, but it was a necessary starting point for the industry. It was 1915, in the midst of the First World War, when animator Max Fleischer developed a technique called rotoscoping and laid the foundation for today's cutting-edge mocap technology. Mocap was born a lifetime before Gollum hit the big screen in The Lord of the Rings, and ages before the Cold War, Vietnam War or World War II. Modern motion-capture systems are the product of a century of tinkering, innovation and computational advances.
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