Vicon announced Blade, a new motion capture processing software system based on the systems development and experience of Vicon and Vicon House of Moves. Blade, designed to work with Vicon's Academy Award-winning realtime motion capture systems, provides a single unified toolset that supports the growing demands of full performance capture, on-set visualization and makes capturing and processing motion capture data for the 3D animation pipeline simpler and more direct.
"With the proprietary camera sensors and new technology in the Vicon MX-F family of motion capture systems, our clients are expanding the scope and range of captured performances," said Tom Tolles, entertainment product marketing, Vicon. "Blade is the only product that puts all the tools into one package in order to streamline everything that happens to motion capture data-acquisition, solving, cleanup and more-when it comes off of the cameras through to integrating it into a 3D software package."
The software includes the following capabilities and advancements:
* Ultra easy motion capture -- Blade streamlines everything from system configuration and actor setup with enhanced intuitive controls and time savers.
* Fully scalable -- Blade provides automated tools designed to simplify motion capture pipelines from boutique small shops to behemoth Hollywood VFX and game development facilities.
* Fast and accurate skeletal solving and re-targeting -- Deliver clean and accurate motion data rapidly to any 3D application with complete user-flexibility and next generation intelligent solving algorithms from Vicon.
* Production tools driving full performance capture -- The demands of capturing facial, finger and body data are handled and delivered with tools that are designed for multiple performer and long scenes. Tap into a completely customizable motion capture scripting engine that is an industry standard.
* On-set playback and visualization tools - Visualize rendered characters, meshes, lighting effects, video synchronization, audio, and video camera overlay for shot selection and preview.
* Blade anywhere -- Blade's plug-in architecture supports easy integration of third party tools into Blade itself. In addition the independent Blade core is easily ported directly to other applications to provide unparalleled ability to integrate motion capture data with other pipelines.
Blade can be configured as a simpler tool for smaller motion capture departments, or as a highly customized and hardware-scalable tool for very large studio uses. Blade comes with a full suite of plug-ins for Autodesk 3ds Max, Maya and MotionBuilder and also includes native support of .XSI and .FBX file formats.
Vicon will be providing customers and prospects with a preview of Blade at SIGGRAPH 2007 from Booth #902. For more information, visit www.vicon.com.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
