Mova Brings Lifelike Motion-Capture To UE3.

[Gikoku]

Mova Brings Lifelike Motion-Capture To UE3.

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Video Demonstration #1
Video Demonstration #2

"This pushes Unreal Engine 3 to its very limit ... it's about as photo-real as you can get in real time." - Steve Perlman

Traditional, point-based motion capture (the kind brought to you by guys in black suits with reflective balls) has been great for developers that want to capture basic skeletal motion for their in-game characters. But for realistic facial work, even setups with hundreds of reflective dots leave developers with rough, blocky data that requires a lot of post-production work to even start approaching the uncanny valley.

Enter motion capture company Mova, whose Contour Reality Capture system uses an array of cameras to create 100,000 polygon facial models that are accurate to within a tenth of a millimeter -- no special reflective balls required. At this year's GDC, the company is trying to attract the game industry's attention by unveiling examples of their facial modeling running in real-time on the popular Unreal Engine 3. Continue reading for exclusive, real-time video of the technology and excerpts from an interview with the Mova founder Steve Perlman.

"This pushes Unreal Engine 3 to its very limit ... it's about as photo-real as you can get in real time."

So says Steve Perlman, the man behind Apple's Quicktime, Microsoft's WebTV and the Mova Contour Reality Capture system that created the above real-time video, shown running on a dual NVIDIA 8800 GTXs with SLI. Frankly, we find it pretty hard to disagree with his assessment. From the little twitches of the eyelids to the extreme curl of the mouth to the weathered wrinkles in in the face, you'd be hard pressed to find a more realistic facial image running on any real-time system. Perlman says the company has been working privately with developers for some time to adapt the system for video game use.

"People have never had this kind of data available before in a game context ... their heads are spinning," he said. "What you're seeing right there is the result of, having time to wrap our heads around this thing and see how we're going to use it, and yes, we can in fact get a face that looks almost photo-real -- you know, not quite, but almost photo-real -- running in a game engine today."

Believe it or not, though, the Contour system can create even more detailed animation when processing time isn't an issue. Check out the below video, which shows how Reality Capture data can look when pre-rendered for a movie or cut scene.

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[Dark Drakan]

Re: Mova Brings Lifelike Motion-Capture To UE3.

Seen that engine in action breifly before, however those 2 demo videos are insane... the possibilities and realism they could bring to games is just overwhelming. How intimidating would it be for a guy in a gangsta style game to get in your face like that second video and can see every expression and almost sense the anger and seriousness of his claims, amazing.

 

[Zingo]

Re: Mova Brings Lifelike Motion-Capture To UE3.

Im really impressed with the facial expressions. But the graphics, nuh... CryEngine still beats it!