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Take a look at what Contour can do. All images © Mova.

In a garage in Palo Alto, California, Steve Perlman crossed the “Uncanny Valley” with the help of a small team, some cameras and lights and a little children’s Halloween makeup. The result is the Contour Reality Capture System, a major evolution in motion capture and animation, sparked by technical innovations in What Dreams May Come and The Matrix trilogy, the latter offering the first use of markerless high-def facial capture for a widescreen feature.

A term coined by Japanese scientist Masahiro Mori, the “Uncanny Valley” describes an artificial character that is real enough to appear lifelike, yet still eerily robotic, causing an instinctive reaction of discomfort from the viewer. The imperceptible cues we learn from birth that portray a living soul are lacking. Recreating those cues has been the difficult task of motion capture, and even challenges the most skilled animator. Accurately recreating an existing living being without getting mired in that Uncanny Valley has been the Holy Grail.

Impressive Detail in Little Time
Perlman, who helped develop Apple’s QuickTime and founded WebTV Networks purchased by Microsoft, is now ceo of Rearden Companies where Contour was born. With some consultants and a dedicated team of four, he has developed Mova Contour’s highly sophisticated software that uses the simplest of materials. Using two separate sets of cameras and fluorescent lights that are synchronized to work in unison, and an actor wearing an application of phosphorescent liquid base makeup, a 3D model can be delivered with lifelike movement to a 10th of a millimeter in detail. With a resolution capability of more than 100,000 polygons per frame and up to 120 frames per second, realistic motion capture with reference textures can be delivered in a turnaround time of only 24 hours. There is no offset from the skin surface, making the character photoreal, and multiple performers and props can be captured at once while moving about freely within the camera view.

The detail available is impressive, so far only limited by in what resolution the data is captured. Perlman explains, “You’ll find demos on the mova.com website at 1920x662 HDTV resolution that are one quarter of the actual resolution, which is 1,300 pixels tall; 100,000 polys is a conservative measure. Our demos are done at a tenth of a millimeter. A close-up on the mouth is one example we use a lot. We’re wondering where the resolution limitation is, but we haven’t found it yet.”

Child’s Play
The process is simple. Using a makeup sponge, the phosphorescent makeup is applied over the actors face, neck and clothes as required. The actor enters a space much like a holodeck on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Surrounded by an array of cameras and lights that are synchronized to flash faster than human perception, the shape of the face and details of movement down to the crinkling of the nose and the tamest of smiles, or the shifting of fabric as the body moves is captured in a high density 3D model that requires almost no cleanup. Even normally obscured areas such as under the chin are included when an adequate number of cameras are used.

The natural unevenness of the sponged-on phosphorescent makeup facilitates the process. Contour uses the random patterns to triangulate. Take, for example, two cameras. One camera finds a specific spot on a cheek. The other camera scans the entire face till it finds that spot. If the patterns were not random, it would not be able to uniquely identify that area. In marker-based MoCap, all the dots look the same, creating ambiguity, and there is a high cost for manual labor required for cleaning up the captured data. With Contour, there is no data clean up because the random pattern disambiguates the captured data. Contour can also track points on the captured surfaces through time, by looking for exact patterns from frame to frame.

Instead of using dozens of glued-on markers, like a conventional motion-capture system, the Contour Reality Capture System uses sponged-on phosphorescent makeup. Photo credit Austin Hice. 

Many Uses
The potential of Contour has only begun to become apparent. Actors can be aged or made to look younger, which is why David Fincher is reportedly using Contour on his next feature, the reverse aging fantasy, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, starring Brad Pitt. “It’s less painful than plastic surgery, and less expensive!” Perlman laughs, who coins his process “Volumetric Cinematography.” Actors can be captured in high-res for feature film and low-res for videogames at the same time. Perlman has been approached to scan children’s faces for family memories, and even a bike racer to figure out optimum angles.