At the Game Developer Conference 2018, Epic Games debuted its new real-time motion capturing technology at its booth. The tech demo is known simply as Siren, and much like Epic Games’ demonstration of Senua last year, it features a woman being rendered in real-time via the company’s Unreal Engine 4 (or simply UE4).
The new demonstration is a collaboration between Epic Games, CubicMotion, 3Lateral, Tencent, and Vicon, and the model in the demo was based off the likeness of Chinese actress Bingjie Jiang. The floor demo essentially showed off how UE4 was being used to project the movements of an actor onto the digital character – in real-time.
The entire setup used 3Lateral’s facial rigging technology, Vicon’s motion capture system for body animation, and Cubic Motion’s facial tracking technology to track more than 200 facial features at more than 90 frames per second.
While the technology behind Siren isn’t exactly new, the techniques that are used in achieving this amount of realism and detail for a digitally rendered character is still as groundbreaking as it was when Epic Games showed it off two years ago with Ninja Theory’s Senua character.
“Everything you saw was running in the Unreal Engine is at 60 frames per second,” Kim Libreri, CTO, Epic Games, told members of the media in a press briefing at GDC 2018. “Creating believable digital characters that you can interact with and direct in real-time is one of the most exciting things that has happened in the computer graphics industry in recent years.”
Ultimately, this technology could allow companies, directors, and producers to observe the application of an actor’s performance in real-time, thus saving time and money in the development of games, films, or even in advertisements.
(Source: YouTube [1] [2], VentureBeat, Engadget)
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