Motion Capture
Vicon’s new tool Shogun automates calibration for fast motion capture solving. Kerrie Hughes reports on the time-saving technology
How Vicon’s new Shogun software saves time and money
Shogun has been designed to Save you time and Save you Money while delivering the highest quality data Imogen Moorhouse, CEO, Vicon
The mind-bending world of motion capture is impacting the world like never before. This process of recording movement of objects or people and mapping the data into a 3D world has come a long way in recent years. Evidence of this can be found in Shogun, Vicon’s recently revealed software for solving and outputting skeletal data for animation. Capitalising on over 30 years of motion capture experience, Vicon built Shogun with the intention of enhancing the mocap workflow, from system setup to exported data, to meet the growing demands of the entertainment industry.
“Animation tech is constantly evolving and improving with each new VFX production or high-end video game. It’s important that motion capture keeps up with these advances,” says Tim Doubleday, VFX product manager at Vicon. “Shogun has been built from the ground up to focus on skeleton data and to deliver unbreakable real-time. In the past, the real-time would often break or become unreliable when actors performed interactions such as hugs or complex stunt work. This meant that teams would have to throw this data away. With Shogun you can record the real-time direct to disk at the source framerate. What you see in Shogun Live is as real-time as what you get in Shogun Post. This gives users confidence in what they are capturing and saves them hours of work in post-production.”
Live calibration
Unlike other data solving software, Shogun eliminates the previously time-consuming process of calibrating performers from captured data in post. Performers can enter the capture space and be automatically detected and labelled, with the calibration running in the background. This cuts down the lengthy process of labelling subjects, cleaning data and calibrating markers.
“Subject calibration has always been a time-consuming task,” says Tim. “For example, when working with Cloud Imperium Games on Star Citizen, we’d have anything from five to 10 actors on set at a time. With each actor taking around 15 minutes to calibrate, it was between one to two hours before director Chris roberts could call ‘action’ and the shoot could start.
With Shogun, the actor still performs their range of motion, but now the algorithm runs in real-time, calibrating in the background.”
highly functional
With a new skeletal mesh model, the software is designed to be highly functional. “We’ve updated our base skeleton rig and added additional joints around the spine, neck and feet,” says Tim. “We’ve also made the skeleton the focus of the pipeline. You can visibly see the joints being scaled as they perform the exercise. The result is a highly accurate, proportionally correct skeleton ready in less than two minutes.
“Uniquely, we’ve also added a mesh to our 3D data, which enables users to visualise their moves as they’d see them in a game engine or animation package. We’ve also improved our support for game engines and offer streaming into Unreal and Unity, as well as supporting re-targeting solutions such as Ikinema Liveaction, motionbuilder and Pegasus. Vr is also an important market for us and we’re working with the major players to enable Vicon tracking with their HMD solutions.”
The remapping of the noise was controlled by a ramp projected from above. This meant that the team had complete control over the direction and behaviour of the noise, while keeping it organic. There were also several layers of displacement and colour, all controlled by the projected ramp. “This became a very heavy and complex shader, but it did the trick,” says Dave.
Preview scenes
Shogun’s support for the major real-time game engines means directors can use the system to preview a direct visualisation of the scene. Alexandre messier, technical director at Ubisoft, has been beta testing the Shogun software for several months alongside Vicon. He says: “most of our game teams are now asking for real-time previsualisation. With Shogun’s auto skeleton calibration, we can now stream accurate data into third parties’ solutions in seconds, allowing teams to maximise their time on the shoot floor. Shogun is adding speed to our data processing pipeline. most importantly, that speed is not sacrificing any data quality.”
Live subject calibration, system health tools and unbreakable real-time offer huge benefits to studios. “Shogun is a step change in the way our customers use motion capture,” says Vicon CEO Imogen moorhouse. “Whether you’re running a large production with a hundred cameras or a small start-up with a handful of cameras, Shogun has been designed to save you time and save you money while delivering the highest quality data.”
For more information, visit www.vicon. com/products/software/shogun