Activision unveils impressive real-time character demo

Activision unveiled some new real-time rendering technology for human characters at the Game Developers Conference last week.This is the result of several years of research in to creating photo realistic human characters for video games. Although the animation itself a bit off and suffers from the infamous "Uncanny Valley" effect, just on a purely technical level this is pretty impressive.

From the video's description on YouTube:

This animated character is being rendered in real-time on current video card hardware, using standard bone animation. The rendering techniques, as well as the animation pipeline are being presented at GDC 2013, "Next Generation Character Rendering" on March 27.

The original high resolution data was acquired from Light Stage Facial Scanning and Performance Capture by USC Institute for Creative Technologies, then converted to a 70 bones rig, while preserving the high frequency detail in diffuse, normal and displacement composite maps.

It is being rendered in a DirectX11 environment, using advanced techniques to faithfully represent the character's skin and eyes.

More technical details can be found here.

Via Cartoon Brew.

A digital dragon puppet

A nice example of a digital shadow puppet, made by Luis Leite using Kinect and Unity 3D. To animate the puppet, a human body is tracked in real-time using the Kinect sensor, with one hand controlling the head and the other controlling the tail. The physical movement of the performer's body is remapped on to the virtual shadow puppet using Inverse Kinematics via Unity's Mecanim animation system.

Luis was also responsible for a Kinect-based digital puppet that was mentioned in a post about Kinect-based digital puppetry on Machin-X two years ago.

Digital Puppetry with the PS4

Earlier this week game development studio Media Molecule gave a R&D presentation at the launch event for Sony's new PlayStation 4 (PS4) video game console, which appears to have some amazing new capabilities like the ability to sculpt, create and animate in real time that offer phenomenal potential for digital puppetry applications. Media Molecule won't too much about what they're working on (yet), but their demo utilizing the PS4 and the often-derided PlayStation Move controller looks amazing (skip ahead to the 5:15 mark to see all the digital puppetry goodness).

Very exciting!

Via Puppeteers Unite.

Karagoz goes digital

Indonesian shadow puppetry has gone digital, so why not Turkish shadow puppetry too?

iKaragoz is an app for iPhone and Android developed by a Turkish firm called Anakule. They are promoting it as the first puppet application for mobile devices, but it's definitely not (several others including iPuppeteer and Pollock's Toy Theatre app have been on the market for years).

The app allows the user to control the characters onscreen intuitively by simply moving their smart phone or tablet.In addition to the traditional Turkish Karagoz puppets, additional packs with characters from Cambodian, Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, Thai and Greek puppetry traditions are also available.

Here's the Wayang Kulit version in action:



iKaragoz was designed by Uğur Doğan with the assistance of Turkish puppeteer Mehmet Saylan. It's available to download from the iTunes Store and Google Play. I haven't had a chance to try it out myself yet, but if someone does please let me know what you think!

Via Puppetry News.

Bryn Oh, Imogen and the pigeons

Bryn Oh is the avatar and pseudonym of a professional oil painter who lives here in Toronto who has been creating mesmerizing and challenging multilayered installations inside the virtual world of Second life for several years (see previous post). I'm especially impressed by Bryn's latest work Imogen and the pigeons, an "immersive narrative exhibited in the virtual world called Second Life...a layered story told through poetry."

I find it difficult to classify work like this. Is it Machinima, immersive interactive art, digital puppetry, all of the above, or something else entirely? While I'm not entirely sure what the answer to that question is, I do know that I like it. A lot. It's inspiring to see the innovative ways that Bryn Oh is exploring and expanding how this still new medium can be used.

You can explore Imogen and the pigeons inside Second Life (click here and follow the instructions to join Second Life) and/or see more of Bryn Oh's previous Second Life builds on YouTube.

Digital Shadow Puppet Installation

A nice look at an interactive, Kinect-based digital shadow puppet installation created by New York based motion designer Yang Yang.

Digital Guignol Theater

I've been doing a lot of Punch and Judy research lately and I stumbled across this Digital Guignol Theater that was created by Wizarbox in 2009. A proof-of-concept demo intended to aid in children during rehabilitation, it allows them to control a digital Guignol (the French equivalent of Punch) show using their voice and one or more Wiimotes.