Posts Tagged 3D
World Builder
A moving video by Bruce Branit, of a man who creates a 3D virtual world for his dying wife to enter. His instruments mark some resemblance to those used in Minority Report by Tom Cruise.
It is interesting to see the character build the scene. He uses the same process that any 3D artist would use, only not with a mouse and keyboard but with his hands. A perfect example at 02:59 shows reflection and transparency being applied to a surface to produce a window.
World Builder was shot in a single day followed by about 2 years of post production. Branit is the owner of Branit VFX based in Kansas City.
VideoTrace: Creating 3D models from video
Posted by Shareef in CG, documentary, technology on February 28th, 2009
Researchers at the Australian Centre for Visual Technologies have created a tool that can allow users to plot points in 3D space to create a model, using a video as a point of reference. VideoTrace lets the user scroll through a sequences of frames in a video and trace the shape of an object. It will then get texture information from the polygons plotted and map them onto the model’s surface. In essence, it creates a textured shell. The abstract from their five page report states:
Each of the sketching operations in VideoTrace provides an intuitive and powerful means of modelling shape from video, and executes quickly enough to be used interactively. Immediate feedback allows the user to model rapidly those parts of the scene which are of interest and to the level of detail required. The combination of automated and manual reconstruction allows VideoTrace to model parts of the scene not visible, and to succeed in cases where purely automated approaches would fail.
Their demonstration video shows how fast the process actually is. Once they model the SUV you can tell which is the copy as the real SUV has a reflection from the sun on the windscreen. It is an amazing software.
Creating Brad Pitt at 60, 70 & 80 years old
Posted by Shareef in CG, documentary, movies, technology on February 24th, 2009
A fascinating talk at the TED conference 2009 by Ed Ulbrich, president and digital-effects guru of Digital Domain, on the subject of creating Brad Pitt at ages 60, 70 and 80 for the Oscar-winning film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Deeming traditional facial motion tracking inadequate, his team underwent the near impossible task of tackling the holy grail of the CG industry – the human face – and produced a jaw-dropping performance, with Benjamin being computer generated for the entire first hour of the movie.
After much research, a technique dubbed Contour was chosen, which involved painting Brad’s face with phosphorous so four special HD cameras could scan and produce a real-time 3D reconstruction of the surface movements of his skin. They also created three maquettes of Brad at ages 60, 70 & 80 and scanned them at very high resolution to create digital replicas. The digital maquettes were then transposed onto the contour scan to produce a CG character that mimicked Brad’s movements.
Effectively we created the digital puppet that Brad Pitt could operate with his own face. There are no animators necessary to come in and interpret behaviour or enhance his performance…. we ended up calling the entire process and all the technology Emotion-capture as oppose to just motion capture.
This is a huge break through for the CG industry and the team at Digital Domain were rewarded for their efforts on sunday with an Oscar for Best Achievement in Visual Effects category.
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