Softimage's Marc Stevens views its partnership with USC as a way for the company to expose up-and-coming artists to its products. USC was the first institution in North America to have Face Robot installed.

Originally, the Vicon system was installed several years ago when the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts opened at USC's School of Cinematic Arts. It has been used for films, demos and other purposes since then, but this is the first course the School has offered that focuses specifically on mocap. For this semester only, the class gets to work with a new on-loan system that represents Vicon's latest technology.

Looking into the Future
Furie says the initial class has met and exceeded expectations, and that the School plans to move forward with a mocap curriculum. "It was a really great class, not just of its own accord, but in terms of how we teach the curriculum going forward," he says. Because the learning curve is so steep for a 15-week course, one change will be to split this class into two parts, with the first focusing on the technical side of mocap fundamentals and being a prerequisite for the second, which will deal more with the creative side, similar to the initial class. Enrollment will increase to 15 and the class will be open to interested students from all of the School's six divisions.

The partnership between the School and Softimage, like all industry-education alliances, brings benefits to both sides and will continue. "The technological hurdles for a school like ours are just too massive without help from the industry," Furie points out.

"Not a lot of schools teach facial animation because of these enormous technological hurdles," adds Kang.

For Softimage, the partnership allows the company to expose up-and-coming artists to its products. "We want them to have the latest and greatest, and to be familiar with our tools," says Stevens, who reports that USC was the first institution in North America to have Face Robot installed. A few programs in Asia are using it as well.

There also are benefits for Softimage from a product development perspective. "It opens up a lot of opportunities for artistic collaborations in one of the best film schools in the country," says Kang. He points out that Robert Zemeckis, one of the visionaries in performance capture, gave the company feedback on Face Robot and about some of the things he'd like to accomplish in the future if technology allowed it. "I can't overemphasize how valuable that is for us."

Karen Raugust is a Minneapolis-based freelance business writer specializing in animation, publishing, licensing and art. She is the author of The Licensing Business Handbook (EPM Communications).