Realtime Cinema Research

Harry Schreurs and Jilt van Moorst present their real-time cinema research at Unite Europe 2016 in Amsterdam.

Harry Schreurs and I were interviewed before our talk at Unite Europe last week, turned out into a nice article.

Adding tracking markers to an ipad. To be used as a virtual light controller and/or a simple virtual camera.

Today I implemented a lightweight, multi-threaded UDP sender and receiver to share real-time motion capture data between computers and mobile devices with minimal latency.

OptiTrack Motive streaming real-time into Unity.

Found a surprise on my desk this morning. Meindert prepared the new 'lightweight' virtual camera rig for testing Lightcraft Previzion in our test studio. See if you can spot the actual (Blackmagic) camera.

So it looks like my hunch was correct. Here you can see the results of our first mocap test with the wide angle lens retrofitted to the 12 OptiTrack cameras. So much better....  Thanks Lukas for the moves!

Trying out some things after getting disappointing results in the motion capture studio. The problem is likely to be that the space is so small that the cameras are really close together and have very little overlapping view. Today was spent fitting a wider angle lens to our 12 IR cameras and getting them in focus. 

The same functionality is now implemented in our Unity project by writing a script that changes the scale of a textured quad so that it always fits the screen, at any depth.

Animated Digital Doubles in Unity

On stage at Samsung’s 2014 developer conference last week, Warren Mayoss, Head of Technology Product Development at DreamWorks Animation, spoke about the company’s initial work with virtual reality on the Oculus Rift and Gear VR. Though they’ve produced several real-time VR experiences, the studio’s bread and butter is high-fidelity pre-rendered CGI. But how to bring that… Read the full article …

Today I can finally continue researching the motion capture <> Unity integration. Lacking a 24/7 assistant, I decided to create a 'stickman' out of scaffolding. This assistant shouldn't get tired of the t-pose too soon...

Finally managed to stream realtime motion capture data from our OptiTrack system in to Unity.

Controller runs on any iOS/Android device.

Like the bastard progeny of experimental theater and video game production, this horror film required a new, complex form of cinematography.

First test of real-time facial capture streaming from Faceshift into Unity3D