Hellblade Real-Time Motion Capture Turns The Real Into Virtual Seamlessly

Game developer Ninja Theory is making a video game called Hellblade that is using some very impressive motion capture technology to get a real actresses movements and emotions into the virtual world. The game is focused on a female Viking warrior called Senua who is battling insanity. Ninja Theory showed off a demo of how it is capturing motion from actress Melina Juergens and putting it into the game at GDC.

The motion capture will so seamless and real-time that every facial movement and word the actress speaks was captured in the game world. The motion capture is fast enough to capture everything from anger to emotions like crying, as soon as the actresses eyes welled up with tears, the on-screen character cried as well. The entire motion capture system is very impressive and shows what goes on behind the scenes to give gamers the immersion they expect.

The motion capture demo was shown at the Epic Games briefing at GDC. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney wanted to give fans a glimpse at the motion capture to show how far 3D graphics have come and the sort of tools that are used behind the scenes. The tech used in the demonstration was from firms Cubic Motion and 3 Lateral.

"It's really getting hard to distinguish between computer graphics and reality," Sweeney said. "You can see this leading to something like the Metaverse in science fiction."

"There's no question that what the camera was to the 20th century, the game engine is today," Sweeney continued.

The videos here show just how the actress works to make the motion capture. If you thought making video games today was all voice actors reading scripts and geeks behind computers coding characters, it's not. We saw the first trailer for Hellblade last summer.

SOURCE: Venturebeat