Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/196542
dimensional imaging 3D markerless performance capture Founded in 2003, Dimensional Imaging was a pioneer in passive stereo photogrammetry; that is, in creating 3D models from stereo pairs of images. Its customers included facial surgery researchers. Recently, the company evolved from static 3D capture to performance capture, and moved into entertainment as well as medical research. "Our breakthrough project in entertainment was the trailer for the Dead Island game from Axis Animation, which went viral, says Colin " Urquhart, CEO. Now the company's systems are helping map an actor's performance onto a character for a feature film. "Instead of still cameras, we're using 60 fps video and acquiring stereo pairs of images, Urquhart says. "We can track " through a sequence of frames to get a fixed topology mesh that deforms. That's what makes our system unique and useful for entertainment. You could think of it as Mova without the but meaningful to everyone. You can create a mouth position using a number of shapes that match an actor's performance, but they also have to be understandable to an animator. You have to be able to art-direct them." The final stage in creating the facial performance is matching or creating the character's appearance. "Everyone talks about faces in terms of animating them, but it's super important to understand how the skin reflects light, how the eyes behave, how blood flows across the face," Roberts says. "We do a lot of work with displacement maps over the geometry to get the high-resolution, highfidelity look. With ICT, we do micro-geometry captures by scanning small areas of the cheeks and forehead, almost beyond pore level, to understand how light bounces in the pores and comes back out again. It's amazing to see that detail propagate procedurally back into the digital face." As for real-time performance capture and retargeting, "it always comes up in conversation, but the question is why would a production need it," Roberts says. "Obviously, you need it for real-time events, like live TV shots or concerts. But, it's hard to generate high fidelity. For games or films, it might be important to give feedback to the actor if the character being driven is very disproportionate or nonhuman, but sometimes it's better to let the actor perform." So, the crew at Digital Domain devised a unique solution. Rather than trying to apply the facial performance to a character in real time during filming, the crew pulls the video from the face-mounted cameras and projects that onto the digital character. "The video image is like a mask," Roberts says. "It's inexpensive to generate, and it helps with shot composition because you can see the intent in this close-up of the face. Everyone who sees it wants to use it." – Barbara Robertson CounterPunch Studios is a leader in one of the fastest growing sections of the visual-effects market: photo-real digital double creation of any human and high fidelity rigging for International & Domestic Film, Television, Commercials, Video Games and Government industries. We continually upgrade our proprietary toolset and specialized pipeline for the developing markets requiring higher quality CG content on all platforms. CounterPunch Studios continues to push boundaries and surpass quality bars for several industry leaders and their reviews are genuine: "(These) rigs are probably the nicest facial rigs we have ever seen in our studio. " "I'm truly blown away and I've been dealing with facial rigs for close to 20 years" Our team is able to create a customized pipeline to meet a large spectrum of projects: from Photo Real to Stylized and at various budgets and timelines. Find out how we can unleash our technology on your project. We will take it to the highest level. 814 S. WESTGATE AVE. SUITE 100 LOS ANGELES, CA 90049 TEL: 310-656-6592 http://www.counterpunchstudios.com C G W S e p t e mb e r / O c t o b e r 2 013 ■ 15