Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1489831
28 cgw o c t o b e r • n o v e m b e r • d e c e m b e r 2 0 2 2 T he history of motion control reflects the history of VFX itself in many ways. If you look at the hardware, it has evolved over nearly fiy years from jerry-built, individual set-ups kludged together by VFX departments to sleek, high-performance machines capable of high-speed, supremely ac- curate movement time and time again. And if you look at the so- ware that controls these machines you can trace the same sort of path, one that goes from bespoke coding to the sort of elegant user interface design that allows a wide range of non-technical users to simply jump in and start working with motion control straight away. At MRMC [Mark Roberts Motion Control] we first started devel- oping our soware control system Flair in the early 1990s. Motion control had been digital for close to a decade, but the new breed of standardized, turnkey robots that we were building to satisfy grow- ing demand, such as the ground-breaking Milo, needed equally stan- dardized, powerful soware. The first rig running Flair soware, a Cyclops, landed at CellAnima- tion in 1993. It was genuinely revolutionary. There were other motion control vendors active in the market, but they tended to either pro- duce the robotics or the soware. MRMC uniquely did both, allowing us to iterate and develop the soware at a speed according to cus- tomer requests and move motion control out of the realm of being a pure engineering solution. DECADES OF OPTIMIZATION That is very much where we are now aer three decades of devel- opment. The motion control market has changed substantially over that time, to the point where the rental houses that used to make up all of our customers are now only about 50%. The other half is represented by a growing number of studios and filmmakers who are creating their own content using the technology. They haven't come from an engineering background, or sometimes even from a techni- cal one, and they appreciate the decades of optimization that we've put into Flair to make it progressively simpler and more powerful to use. Like a lot of soware, from motion control to everyday packages such as word processing and spreadsheets, the actual raw features have been established and optimized a long time ago. The way Flair controls the various rigs in our armory, from the smallest to the larg- est, is a known quantity. It's hugely sophisticated, giving users the ability to produce simple arcs, orbits, and linear motions, and run- ning up to much more advanced features and control, resulting in pixel-perfect repeatable motions every time. And it just works. So why do we keep pumping resources into its continual devel- opment? Because it has to reflect the way that the industry chang- es around it. Motion control is part of a workflow, and that means that our robots need to work with computer graphics systems and lighting systems. There's a huge buzz around virtual production at the moment — there are very few of our customers now that haven't dabbled in virtual production in one way, shape, or form — and that means our rigs also need to be able to interface with Unreal Engine. Development never stops. NEW FEATURES That's why we are still integrating new features into Flair that reflect the way that people work. Focus Assist is a good example and is en- abled by a small hardware add-on to the front of the camera that piggybacks on the power and data wiring already existing for the lens motors. This removes the need for manual tape measurements to be taken in order to achieve crisp focus on whatever object or ob- SHOWCASE A FLAIR FOR INNOVATION TRACKING THE EVOLUTION OF MOTION CONTROL ROBOTICS IN VFX BY ASSAFF RAWNER