Whilst working as a Character Animator at Cloud Imperium Games I was introduced to a photographic based 3d capture technology that was being used primarily at CIG to accurately capture character heads\\faces.<\/p>\n
The setup used to achieve the head\\face capture was\\is very sophisticated and consisted of a large array of expensive synchronised DSLR cameras with fixed focal length lenses arranged in a spherical orbit formation around the subject.<\/p>\n
There’s nothing particularly new here and the technique is similar, albeit a static snapshot, as opposed to the real-time motion scanning technique that was used on LA Noire by Team Bondi.<\/p>\n
On speaking with the face tech team at CIG I discovered that the technique could be adapted to allow the use of a single DSLR, by simply moving the point of view around the subject in order to mimic the dozens of camera angles required by\u00a0 the clever software that then stitched them all together in order to extract the depth imformation.<\/p>\n
At some later stage my eye was caught by an indie game coming out of Poland by a dev team going by the name ‘The Atronauts’. ‘The Vanishing of Ethan Carter’ leant heavily on this photographic 3D capture technique and put it to very impressive use via the Unreal Engine.<\/p>\n