David Cage isn’t the only one in the media landscape interested in the future of full-body performance capture – it seems that Lucasfilm is getting in on the game as well. At a BAFTA event in London this week, the company’s chief technology strategy officer Kim Libreri showed a video demonstration essentially using a game engine to affect post-process effects and changes to a film scene in real time, much like Cage’s Beyond.
The demonstration, which seemed to be running on what was presumably the engine powering the scrapped Star Wars title 1313, showed off C-3PO, R2-D2, a stormtrooper and some other familiar imagery on the surface of Tatooine, with real actors in performance capture suits acting out their parts as the game engine rendered the action on-screen in real-time. (Again, exactly like Beyond.)
While you could definitely tell that the characters on-screen were both CG and not out of the uncanny valley, Libreri said over the next decade engines will become powerful and sophisticated enough to theoretically eliminate effect-based post-processing entirely, replacing it with real-time, on-the-fly changes (similar to the real-time rendering process for, say, Unreal Engine 4.)
A bold claim, to be sure, but this tech is definitely only getting more sophisticated, and Cage’s studio Quantic Dream has already shown off the kind of real-time rendering capable just with the fixed specs of the PS4. Every day the sci-fi future gets a little closer to reality. Hit the link below for more, including the Lucasarts demo video.
Via The Inquirer
