GDC08: Ridiculously Good Real Time Motion Capture from Mova for Unreal Engine 3

Without the need of those goofy mo-cap ping pong balls, motion capture company Mova is bringing near photo realistic quality motion capture to the most popular current generation graphics engine. Using an array of cameras, powerful software maps 100,000 polygons in real time to create highly life like facial expressions. Mova founder Steve Perlman had this to say in Joystiq's scoop:

"This pushes Unreal Engine 3 to its very limit ... it's about as photo-real as you can get in real time. People have never had this kind of data available before in a game context ... their heads are spinning. What you're seeing right there is the result of, having time to wrap our heads around this thing and see how we're going to use it, and yes, we can in fact get a face that looks almost photo-real – you know, not quite, but almost photo-real – running in a game engine today."

This technology could save thousands of dollars and time. With the traditional mo-cap of the day, game makers get blocky, skeletal motion that they then have to turn into a convincing character. Mova's technology makes a near perfect face almost immediately after a shoot and seems to actually avoid the uncanny valley. Combining this with the extensive technologies already found in the Unreal Engine III, we games can hope for developers to spend more time on gameplay and story, and less time trying to get the tech right.

Posted by Clayton Ashley at 4:00 PM | Comments (6) | Posted to Business | PC | PlayStation 3 | Xbox |