Siggraph

My pal, Dan Ochiva, alluded in an earlier posting to Vicon’s new F40 camera system with its proprietary sensors, and many mo-cap hardware developments generally. But, in popping in at the busy Vicon booth (#902) today, I was also impressed with the company’s software work with the debut of its new Blade processing technology. Vicon’s approach seems to be to package the whole mocap workflow process inside a single, unified, proprietary toolset under the Vicon umbrella.

Vicon’s CEO, Brian Nilles, says clients wanted to keep data from capture onward inside a single pipeline as it gets pushed into the 3D animation process, and Vicon responded with Blade. The tool, he emphasizes, is scalable to fit with boutique pipelines to those of monolithic studios. And, he adds, it was also designed with plug-in architecture to easily bring in third-party applications, as studios figure out various new ways to integrate their mocap and animation pipelines.

Vicon also launched a mo-cap oriented film festival at Siggraph this week. The company is offering a $10,000 grand prize to artists who create original short films (between two to five minutes) incorporating motion capture data provided by Vicon on its festival web site (www.vicon.com/filmfestival/) in new and unique ways. The plan is to post selected entries on YouTube for public voting, and the top 10 vote-getters will be judged by a panel of industry experts, with the winner reeling in the grand prize.

–Michael Goldman