EXACT LIKENESS Clear Angle captures precise detail for the creation of realistic digital humans
by VFX teams in a digitally rendered world, where virtual lights will illuminate the scanned object as required. Ridley describes it as “a blank canvas which can have lighting, animation and rigging added to it – but the foundation is exact.” As the technology has developed, Ridley has observed the emergence of new, perhaps unexpected markets. “We’re seeing a lot of interest in the head capture market, despite the fact that AI technologies are out there. There’s an area where talent captures themselves, so they have ownership of their own data. This is happening across sports, politics and CEO-level individuals – perhaps so they can police their likeness online, or have a secondary revenue stream where they can license out their likeness without going out on a shoot or in a space.” This thought seems timely, with the world waking up to new realities around people’s own image. For example, Denmark has recently been discussing new laws regarding the rights to control use of a likeness. As Ridley points out, there are many reasons to deploy the technology. “There’s an interest in creating very believable human faces, so you can have avatar conversations without having to travel. There is a lot of interesting chatter about that kind of thing, and we’re often asked if we can capture the data. It’s a very curious space, and we’ll start seeing many more digital avatars around.
We’ve done research projects with Nvidia, as well as a couple of private medical institutions. It’s an exciting prospect.” Meanwhile, the world of video games has seen sufficient technological leaps to make Clear Angle’s work increasingly relevant. “I’m not sure there are renderers yet that can properly display every detail,” Ridley muses, “but there’s still that creative need to see what boundaries you can push, and to showcase to the wider interested community what can be achieved if they have that level of detail – now that they know where to capture it.” Clear Angle has built three Dorothy scanners, with two in production centres and one free to move around the world. “One is in Culver City in Los Angeles, one is at Pinewood Studios and the third is a free-moving unit. Our Dorothy systems can travel – we can pack them up and move them. We can even ship them in air freight, and when they’re completely out of our hands, they’re still robust. It’s a two-day set-up – the team is well versed, it’s all in-house and they have over a decade of experience.” “Many of our team members,” Ridley concludes, “have been with us since the beginning. It’s been an interesting journey, and it’s not just Dorothy – there are our environment and prop scans too. Our goal is to capture data faithfully. A big part of the business is ensuring productions have it easy; making the shots or characters look amazing.”
with them as a human. Using the Dorothy scanner, we’re not recreating them – we’re capturing them as they are. Every pore is the same, even the sub-surface blood flow – it’s all shown exactly as it is.” Clear Angle’s system can deliver data representing any selected lighting scenario. A lighting environment can be conveniently supplied as an HDR image, which Ridley likens to the image-based lighting sometimes applied to virtual production: “You can give us an HDRI, and we can put that into our system and project that onto the subject so the subject can perform under that lighting; we can also project multiple HDRIs. We can shoot a subject in our office with the lighting of the final shot.” Thanks to a multiplex lighting set-up, Dorothy is just as capable of producing flat-lit scans representative of no specific lighting environment, for use
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