Glycon 3D Motion Capture - History of the VR Based motion capture system
In August of 1999, Starship Troopers: Roughneck Chronicles made its debut, and my world was rocked.
It had, at the time, some of the best CG work on the planet. It mixed characters from one of my favorite movies (Starship Troopers) with stories from one of my favorite books (Starship Troopers) and added its own flair to it on top. It was amazing.
As I learned more about it, it became evident they were really breaking new ground. Foundation Imaging was one of the companies behind it, with Ron Thornton at the helm. They used LightWave3D for most of the show. Check out this madness:
Many years later, I had the opportunity to work on LightWave at NewTek, and through them, I finally met Ron. Another decade later, I finally had a chance to talk to him in depth about one of my favorite shows.
One of the biggest problems, I was surprised to learn, was motion capture cleanup. The show leveraged tons of motion capture performances, but all of that required extensive cleanup and tweaking.
We talked about how game engines could now do most of the stuff in real time that he used to render over many hours. To illustrate my point, I had a demo put together on a VR headset. So we sat there in the San Antonio Olive Garden bar, Ron in a VR headset, and he told me, "Yep. This is the @#$#!* future. There's no going back now."
(Then we let some other people check it out :) )
So Ron and I discussed what could be done at that time, in near real time, in Unreal Engine. He had a plan for a trial run movie, super low budget, to test the waters. I built him a system that would dynamically apply animation to a character in a scene, so all he had to do was move characters around and move the camera around, and the necessary animations would be automatically generated.
The goal was to create a system where they could record motion capture (face only at the time) and audio, and then slap that on a character in Unreal, move them around, and it would all look natural.
To that end, I think we were successful. I mean, it took a LOT of work by several other really talented artists on top of the tech I built for him, but it was an amazing proof of concept.
Still, the thought I kept coming back to was this--what would it take to do Starship Troopers: Roughnecks today? Could it be done in my office somehow? How would I do motion capture?
So I'm sitting there in my Oculus Rift, looking at my hand controllers, as I played a person walking around in VR, and it hit me that I was already doing motion capture, I just couldn't use it in anything else.
That's when the idea for Glycon started. I could create a whole virtual motion capture studio in VR, and save the actual motion capture in popular formats, so people could use it for movies and games.
The name comes from an ancient god, who many historians believe was somewhat of a joke. People knew it wasn't real, it was a giant snake with a wig, and it was probably obvious it was actually a puppet. A puppet god :)
So, here we are just a few years later:
The funny thing is, once you have a tool like this, a lot of other things come to mind. A LOT of new directions and products can spring from this.
So in the coming months, Glycon3D.com will have a few new products. They all spring from this one source.
There are two episodes of Starship Troopers that are still unfinished. One of these days, I'm going to see what I can do to fix that. In the meantime, I'm finishing a few of my games that were put on hold because my character animation skills were terrible.
I'm now fleshing out one of the rooms from The Dark Reef, and you can see that in progress here:
Well that's how it started. A always, if you have any questions or suggestions, please let me know! And if you want to get your hands on a copy, head over to http://www.glycon3d.com/ right now!
-Chilton Webb
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