Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1127068
BITS & PIECES www.postmagazine.com 7 POST MAY/JUNE 2019 doing any previews at this point, basically, there'll be some kind of motion capture system, generally of like an OptiTrack system, possibly a suit, but generally not suit, unless it's some kind of outdoors thing. Then, they obviously have their central kind of timecode management system, and then everything's synced to that — body motion capture, audio capture and facial capture. So we basically slot in as one of those components in terms of the facial capture, so we're recording synchronized data along with everything else. Now, obviously that's just a straight capture set up with some hardware which is obviously the minimum we would do. "Of course, what we're then able to do is solve and stream that data back out. For realtime previs. you can get realtime body previs, into something like Motion Builder or something like that. So that's streaming straight from the body solver. Similarly, the facial solver will stream facial data and that can be displayed simulta- neously with the body, so we've got a full-moving character. And that will normally be done in either Motion Builder or straight to a game engine. With game engines being, I suppose, things that are used more and more frequently in this kind of scenario because you get a better render of the actual character. "Everything that's going through our system is being recorded, logged as a video, the tracking, the solved animation being recorded, so at the end that day you'd go away from the set with a disk drive of that performance. So, in a virtual production set up, you then can take that and then pass that on down the pipeline, share that with various kind of parties that are working on the project. You have that immediate access to all of that performance data, rather than having to say, take the video away, go and send it somewhere and wait for some processing to happen and then getting it back. So it's kind of instant data that comes straight from the set. "In some respects, Persona is making the playing field of facial animation level with that of body animation. With a system like Vicon or OptiTrack, you don't get lots of camera data that you then need to fix and get into an animated state, you get animation there and then nobody really even bothers with the video data from a body-capture system. And that's very similar to what Persona's enabling now, is for you to leave with the facial animation data there and then, rather than worrying about the video data, you get all the video data as well. But, primarily, we're inter- ested in giving people that animation from the day." — By Barry Goch Visit www.postmagazine.com for Barry Goch's full inteview.