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New Technologies for Games Development

For a BBC television project, Artem Digital deployed 18 Vicon cameras to capture an actor in a London pub. Later (right), Vicon’s iQ software analyzed the data and replaced the actor with a see-through CG model to show what happens to the human body after drinking alcohol.

Staying on top of new technologies is a big part of staying on top of your game, especially when your business revolves around providing services to game developers and other entertainment production entities. Within the field of motion capture, this means being able to roll with any punches a client might throw your way.

At Artem Digital, a motion-capture studio in the U.K., we've seen motion capture evolve from a fledgling innovation into a flexible, cost-effective production tool. Games companies, which tend to be progressive, continue to push the envelope for the types of action and interaction attempted on the motion-capture stage. And everywhere, the quest for heightened realism has many people — not just in games, but also in film and television — looking to motion capture.

We've equipped ourselves with a Vicon 8i motion-capture system using 18 high-resolution MCam cameras with infrared strobes. The system, rugged and reliable, allows us to accurately record human performers, animals, and props in our studio, on site, or on location. Most recently, we used the Vicon iQ software to help streamline what has been one of the most difficult aspects of motion capture to date: processing, or editing, volumes of data once captured.

As an example, we recently deployed our Vicon 8i system with Vicon iQ on a forthcoming game title for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. Entitled This Is Football 2004, it is the 15^th soccer game our team has captured. The project involved recording numerous performers both for in-game animation and for cut sequences. The in-game animation was recorded at Middlesbrough FC's indoor training ground in Darlington, using team reservists. We easily transported our Vicon gear to the site, where we captured more than 500 individual takes. For the cut sequences, we captured the motion of as many as six suited-up actors (along with one marked-up soccer ball!) on our own studio stage. All 262 of our markers tracked faithfully, and we ended the shoot with well over a thousand individual animations.

As you might imagine, doing motion capture for a computer-based soccer game with multiple team members huddling together, running, jumping, etc. can result in a hornet's nest of recorded data. Sorting that all out by hand, which is how data editing once had to be done, could have been a laborious manual task. Doing hand animation on marker data is hideously time consuming, one of those things you think will take a day but ends up taking a week. That's not cost-effective, especially for a motion-capture service bureau.

But here is where innovations like Vicon iQ make a huge difference. Vicon iQ is designed to post-process captured data intelligently. It helps eliminate some of motion capture's traditional problems — mainly the occlusions that occur when markers on a capture subject go missing — by automatically recognizing and resolving ambiguities as they arise. These capabilities are significant, especially when you're talking about high-volume capture sequences with five or six actors.

From capture through to animation, Vicon iQ gives us tools for data management, realtime visualization, post-processing, and modeling. One of its most useful features is rigid bodies, which are sets of markers that move in similar ways. Rigid bodies help automate the process and fill in any gaps in tracked data. The modeling functions in Vicon iQ also make it easy to add in or remove markers. This is particularly helpful in attaching new tracking points virtually, say for a soccer goalie who repeatedly lost physical markers while diving for the ball.

The advent of Vicon iQ has also made working in realtime much easier. During a capture session, we can get intrinsic visualization of what's going on. On set, where large quantities of lighting are required, we get a lot of infrared spillover, and in the past it's been very difficult to see what effect this has on the data. But Vicon iQ has a number of methods for data visualization, such as, for example, displaying the number of reconstructions that haven't been labeled. Now we can see if we have 3,000 markers in the scene instead of 50. And, most importantly, we can see if we are getting what we want during the shoot and react to change things if we're not.

Another example of our increased flexibility is the motion capture we completed for a BBC television project to show what happens to the human body when someone drinks alcohol. The idea was to capture a guy getting drunk in a pub and to replace him out of the frame with a CG model that had a see-through body capable of showing changes to blood vessels and other body functions. Our subject was to be captured at a real London pub. Two or three years ago, we might have shied away from location work because motion-capture systems were not all that suitable for off-site work. This time through, we just took our 18 Vicon cameras down to the pub, clamped them onto the woodwork, and proceeded with the shoot.

Whether for games or film, no one really wants to stop the flow and wait to see the results of a capture session. So, we offer realtime capabilities to show how a real actor's performance is translating to a virtual character in the virtual set. If the camera needs to be tracked as well, we can do that in a sort of Steadicam scenario. Recently we have been developing a system to provide on-set previsualization using the Vicon's improved realtime capabilities. In this, simultaneous realtime capture of a performer and the camera, along with real actors and props and a virtual representation of the environment, allows us to get an immediate visualization of the end result.

Because the real actors and the actor that will be replaced by the virtual character are in the same space, they can interact with each other, maintain correct eye lines, and so on. Furthermore, matching of the real image and the virtual image means that the camera can be moved at will without any loss of synchronization. Not only is this quite exciting, but it's also a major benefit when compared to the alternative — a single actor filmed against a blue screen, pretending to talk to someone who isn't there.

Lately, many of the games we've worked on have taken on a cinematic approach. The Getaway, another game title for Sony and actually the most expensive Sony title to date, was very filmic in style. With so much crossover between games and movies, some say the two are merging. Others say the two genres could not be farther apart. Either way, one thing is for sure: games have become a billion-dollar market with billion-dollar opportunities.

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