Motion Capture Would Be Even More Realistic (And Easy) With Unreal’s Siren

Motion capture, or performance capture, allows for realistic movements and facial animations in games, but to get them working takes a lot of effort. As we have seen last year’s Injustice 2, there’s still the need to clean up the animations to ensure it looks just right.

Epic Games have been working on a real-time motion capture technology and was first seen used for Ninja Theory’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. Unveiled at GDC 2018 is an evolution of the technology called Siren. Epic collaborated with Vico, Cubic Motion, 3Lateral and Tencent to create a motion capture tech that can render and livestreamed immediately into Unreal Engine.

So no more cleanup procedures. The actors and actresses in mo-cap suits can just perform and the results can be seen immediately in-game, to surreal results. The demo showcased at GDC looked a bit uncanny, as it usually is.

Think of it on how virtual YouTubers work, but instead of anime characters, we can now see hyper-realistic renditions of the actors, and rendered in-game. Should the tech be available widely to developers, this could mean even more realistic characters being brought to life games, in quicker time.

Source: Engadget