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Peddy
08-02-2006, 06:30 AM
LinK (http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2006/07/31/contour-a-novel-technique-for-modeling-and-capture/)

"Instead of placing a mesh of glowing dots all over the actor’s face and filming her from various angles to create a moderately hi-res model and motion capture, Contour mixes fluorescent powder into the actor’s makeup, and captures monochromatic shaded images of the actor’s face while she performs under seemingly normal lighting conditions"

Looks very interesting, but unless it creates a full 3d model of the actor, i fail to see how its any more useful than green screen or normal motion capture.

and even if it does create a full 3d model, it appears it would be on such a high detail level that transferring that amount of data, or live-rendering it would be a nightmare.

looks cool though.
SuperRune
08-02-2006, 08:03 AM
As the flash presentation on their website demonstrates, they use this dense vertex animation to drive a low-poly face. Although the technology is somewhat limited (I guess you can't have any occlusion going on in your video - so no full bodies here), it should in theory be capable of capturing extremely fine motion. But if it does - why are the final low-poly animations so bad?

Rune
amygdalae
08-02-2006, 09:01 PM
The problem has never been the capture of facial data, it has been applying it convincingly to a facial rig in an animate-able fashion.

Other companies have had superior image-based facial surface capture for a long time - ILM, ESC, Dreamquest (for Gemini Man tests). The challenge and experimentation has always been in the direction of applying the data to an animate-able rig since direct application of motion capture especially to a retargeted face does not achieve a final-able result.

There are now other solutions for capture facial on set from somewhat wild cameras under regular lighting with no markers. There is no need for a camera lattice and rapidly flickering flourescent light.

Im not sure what niche market this will fill since similar technology has already existed for some time at large studios who have still been looking for a good use for it.
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