Hub Director
Andrew Knight-Hill
Lead - Centre for Sound and Image
Capturing performances against real-time simulated backdrops, exploring the emerging sector of VP and unlocking the potential of new approaches to performance capture. Our research practices explore VP production workflows and innovative approaches to the creative application of these tools.
This Virtual Production Film Studio enables performance and capture in front of real-time simulated backdrops. Powered by a MoSys star tracking system and a high resolution 1.5mm pixel pitch 6m x 3m Alphalite LED wall, the facility enables unparallelled virtual production workflows, maximising the production opportunities of our 10m x 10m studio space.
The camera tracking system dynamically feeds positional data to a rendering engine. This enables the rendering engine to calculate, in real-time, the exact three-dimensional perspective that the camera would expect to see in the real world. This information is fed directly to the virtual backdrop which enables the virtual world to orientate itself accurately and realistically giving the impression that the backdrop and perspective changes when the camera moves.
George Spencer, Senior Lecturer in Animation and Visual Effects at the University of Greenwich stated:
Combining a green screen infinity cove with the LED volume enables flexible application of a diversity of workflows and enables creative approaches in a single unified package. This facility has also proven invaluable for visualisation of large-scale high-resolution data. Colleagues from CAPTIVATE utilise on the 6m x 3m LED wall the space to review their hid-density LIDAR scans of architectural spaces, enabling deeper analysis of formal relationships at relational scales.