Inside CIG: Imaginarium

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   [Music] hi I'm Ben lumon and I am the head of Studio here at the Imaginarium Imaginarium was set up with the premise that we could be a center of excellence for the art and craft of performance capture in Europe performance capture is a fantastic technique it's a fantastic set of tools that gives you life and soul going into a character it works in conjunction with traditional key frame animation which is in itself a fantastic skill set but performance capture I would say is a new art form or relatively new certainly in the world of films and video games we're really excited to be working with Cloud Imperium games on this fantastic project Star Citizen it's a really exciting project for us to be involved

2. 00:00:48

   in um working with Chris who's a Visionary and his fantastic team who have a huge scale and ambition for for what's a very exciting project my name is Steve Bender and I'm the animation director at Cloud Imperium games one of our goals in Star Citizen is to create as realistic of a world that we can one of those ways of doing that is to utilize motion capture and performance capture as a tool to allow us to be able to create a whole lot of motions a whole lot of situations whether you're on a planet that's very wealthy or religious or a nightclub or things like that that gives us the ability to make a whole lot of content and to make unique experiences on each planet hi my name is

3. 00:01:38

   Michael Barkley I'm the lead level designer at Cloud Imperium games so as lead level designer I've been brought down to consult on the on the environments that we've worked on at cig trying to add as much expertise as I can to you know guide the motion sets that we're going to be recording and where the performances are actually being shot you know what kind of atmosphere and what kind of emotion we're trying to convey in each part of the level yeah it's the first time I've Been On Em Motion Set um it's been awesome Phil Bella lead designer at squadron 42 my name is Dave hadock I'm the lead writer at Cloud anderan games yeah so we've uh we've come over this week I just just to got head around the way it works you know and it's it's been an eye opener it's it's just the process involved you know we we'll we'll go off and write a you know like a list of anims but we'll just go ploning you know like your parrot walks up to door and you know kicks it you know but then like

4. 00:02:25

   Steve's rightly pointed out you know you guys need more info you know like so what the back story to the parent why is he kicking the door you know who's he after what's his what's his like motivation and stuff like that so been a lot of fun I'm basically to here writing uh most of the scripts characters planets backgrounds I'm sort of heading up that aspect and you know working with the design team and stuff like that I've only been on one motion capture shoot before but it's just it's really fascinating to see uh how immediately you can see the humanity brought into CG characters uh and you know particular the guys here imaginar it's just it's it's the best of the best type type environment so just seeing the levels that the UK has been creating over these past few months and then seeing actors moving through the spaces and as the characters and playing out the scenes that we've been talking about for months you know it's been really exciting so

5. 00:03:13

   the really exciting thing about this project for us is that we're streaming directly in engine using our prev visualization tools where we're streaming a virtual skeleton using our motion capture equipment straight into a motion Builder which in itself then streams to uh the engine the game engine you can see in real time very close to the final result it's been an exciting uh week in the sense that we're we're learning different things about the way that we're going to be working together one thing that excited me a lot uh over the last couple of days was uh Mike Barkley has been sitting on the sandbox machine and he's he's the level designer he's actually been designing levels uh in a bespoke way dependent on on what we've been doing on set and that's a a very cool new and interesting way of working that has never been done before

6. 00:04:00

   being able to see the characters move around the environments um with the High Fidelity animation uh which is being streamed to the engine at real time uh it's been a massive help for us uh the level designers get to see how the characters are actually going to engage with the space and we can go back and take that experience to continue to develop those spaces and now the challenge for us is to make sure that our environments meet the Fidelity of the animations that we're seeing so we can control the space and control the emotional flow of the level exactly how we want to the thing that motion capture gives us especially with human characters and in our combat in our persistent universe and things like that is it allows us to work with experienced actors and talent that are able to bring

7. 00:04:50

   their personal experiences and their personal knowledge to whatever it is that we're doing being very interesting to see what the actors bring to the performance you know in in your head you'll picture like you know how you kind of do it but then you know when you see a pro doing it it brings a lot more to the table you know it's all the little touches it's all the little things they do and uh you do pick up in it yeah the interesting thing about you know putting a script in the hand of of an actor you've been sitting with these things for for months now you know the idea the characters the backgrounds the motivations all that stuff and then you give it to an actor who's coming into it fresh so they they actually ask a lot of interesting questions that you have taken for granted because you know you remember three drafts ago where you would dressed you know their dying Kitty which made them turn to a life of crime but you got rid of it since then but that's always lingered in the back of your head so seeing how people come to material fresh has always been very

8. 00:05:39

   interesting and then also subsequently their their interpretation of it you know what nuances do they bring to the performance that that make it their own and and and really make it feel alive in our second week of motion capture at The Imaginarium we're going to focus primarily on combat and to do that we're bringing in some very experienced combat soldiers and a military advisor to help create interesting situations and interesting results that we might not otherwise get by just going a sort of traditional AI way we've been talking about how do we realize some of the aliens and Star Citizen and one of the things that we're going to test on the motion capture set is what happens if we have a experienced stunt actor come in

9. 00:06:29

   and and work through some of these motions for the aliens uh what is it that the Shion look like how is it that they move and what is the regality of them or the barbarianism of them um what about the vanuel or other characters within the Star Citizen Universe we will also spend a whole lot of time in doing uh prev visualization so that from an animation and from a design standpoint we're able to do a lot of of motions that are not singular motions but they're all together in a particular performance or in a particular if you would if you're shooting like a movie scene or something like this and then we can take those things and we can bring them to our design team to our animation

10. 00:07:16

    teams to our code teams and we can say this is what we're looking for this is going to be magic in the game and how do we do that how do we make that happen here at the Imaginarium we have some of the best performance capture and motion capture to talent in the world we're so excited by this project it's a fantastic project enormous in its scope and we know that we can really do it justice by bringing fantastic worldclass uh facilities and techniques and tools to this amazingly ambitious project