CompuServe Messages

Andy, >> I've never heard of Superfluo optical system. Is it a new one?? How does it work?? << Superfluo has been around for a few years, they're based in Italy. I think they were one of the first into the optical motion capture arena. They have a very nice system. MetroLight used it for the dancing creatures in the Herbie Hancock video "Dis is da drum". For this project Wavefront's Kinemation was used with the motion capture data, but the dancing thorn creatures were modelled in 3ds. FWIW, there's also a bunch of other creatures and environments (millipede, scorpion, fictious sexual plants etc) that were designed entirely in 3ds at MetroLight by a fine animator/designer called Lars Fields. If you get VH-1 or possibly MTV look out for it – there's 3-4 minutes of rather outrageous computer animation. The performer wears a black spandex suit (very sexy, BTW), and it has a bunch of sensors at strategic locations depending whether you are doing full body, hand-only, or face-only capture (eg joints and limbs, on the face, or hands). The sensors have 3m "scotchlite" reflective coating which is picked up by 4 combined infra-red lights/high-speed cameras sampling at up to 200 times per second. The info is fed into a computer, checked for integrity (occlusion of sensors by body parts etc) and saved for later analysis. After the session the computer analyses the data and produces X,Y,Z data which can then be read into Puppeteer, Alias, Kinemation etc. For the holographic talking head in "Virtuosity", I actually wrote a keyscript to parse the data and create position keys for objects for use in IK and bonesPRO. Not terribly complicated. Martin