Digital Humans have always excited the motion pictures industry albeit the only stumbling block has been the dreaded uncanny valley. Over the last few years, considerable effort has been made to make digi doubles as photorealistic as possible.
In India too, we’ve seen effort being made to in terms of tech, know-how and talent pool to meet the goal of crossing the uncanny valley.
No longer is India a mere service hub for wire removals and rotoscoping . With complex digital assets adorning Indian flicks, Indian VFX scene has bourgeoned into becoming the planet’s VFX capital over the years.
India-based I-C-E Studios that specialises in creating digital assets and digital doubles, successfully leverages the advanced technology named Photogrammetry 3D Scanning Rig — to provide digital solutions to filmmakers.
Speakin to AnimationXpress, Haldia shared, “As cameras and sensors improve, the data also improves but the fundamentals of the technology have remained the same. Be it lightstage or a normal photgrammatery set up, the difference is that it is becoming cheaper or better but other than that it is the same. We are moving away from hardware intensive processes to using more of AI and software to create realistic output.”
Similarly Bengaluru’s ABAI Centre of Excellence (COE) also has been driving up the efforts with the whole body capture Rig comprising 140 DSLR cameras which holds the ability of capturing the subject in just a fraction of a second. ABAI CoE has a successful combination of technical expertise, a proven technical pipeline, and a creative approach to deliver custom solutions.
Recently Epic Games’ most talked about Open Source Software Unreal Engine also has been consistently making massive waves for came its promising feature that notches up the digital humans quotient.
MetaHuman Creator is a unique tool that can help users create life-like human faces with ultra-realistic movements and facial expressions right within their web browsers.
The upcoming episode of The Pulse from Epic Games is all set to see the experts descend and put heads together to evaluate the scope of digital humans.
Digital humans researcher and PhD Mike Seymour—together with of Sony Pictures Imageworks senior VFX supervisor Jerome Chen, Skydance Media president – new media division Amy Hennig, Brud chief design and innovation officer Isaac Bratzel , and 3Lateral (now part of Epic Games) founder Vladimir Mastilović will discuss the recent exciting and innovative advancements in real-time digital humans, and their impact on the future of games, films, and beyond.
Next-gen game platforms are capable of handling extremely realistic characters, but until recently, creating them has been extremely difficult and costly. Now, new tools that make believable, animatable digital humans more accessible to creators bring greater opportunities for realism and player immersion.
While games are definitely limbering up to leverage the coming influx of readily available, highly realistic digital humans, we can expect to see sweeping changes in the entire virtual character landscape—how digital humans are chosen, created, animated, and used—for film and TV and other media as well. Join us as we explore this giant leap forward for digital humankind.
The rise of real-time digital humans session will be conducted on 17 March 2021 at 12 PM PDT | 3 PM EDT | 7 PM GMT. A must watch for digital humans enthusiasts!
