Siggraph

Met with Vicon this morning. The Brit-based company, which has been a leading supplier of motion capture hardware/software for years, created a bit of stir when they bought service company House of Moves a few years back. What’s a manufacturer doing going into competition with potential customers?

Whatever you think of that situation, what it has done is bring to the fore the sorts of creative, workflow, and budgeting issues all of its customers face. Earlier this year, House of Moves moved in with Vicon’s LA-based Entertainment services headquarters; this has not only helped to consolidate product design and product use, but also created a feedback loop that seems to have benefited both.

Some of the results can be seen at the show, with the release of a new software package that integrates technical chops with improved workflow that reflects real world production issues.

Flexibility for each client’s needs is the result; Vicon’s engineers have made the software modular, scalable, and able to use a parallel scheme for data handling, speeding things considerably, according to the coders I spoke with. The software–now divided up into rendering, data I/O paths, etc. and not all glommed together–runs over many more processing nodes, blowing by the usual bottlenecks. This enabled the company to recently test out real time mo cap sessions that included up to 12 actors, something not feasible before.

Another cool development that speed delivers: by placing tracking markers on a standard camera or camcorder, Vicon can take data from mo cap actors, replace the live action with CG, and feed it to the camera. What’s this do? Since the mo cap system now knows where the camera is in relation to the actors, a director can walk around with the camera, try different positions and angles, and have immediate feedback to make a framing decision.

The same setup can work for the pre viz phase. An Autocad design from a storyboard, overlayed with simple color or texture maps, can be fed to a camera on a stage. The director and DP can walk through the scene, try different positions and angles to make their decisions. By the time the actors walk onto the set, the director has solved most of the major setups and shots.