FIRA Toolset: Fast Immersive Rigging and Animation

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"A key factor holding back the projected growth of immersive content is the quality of character, creature and performance animation currently enabled by real-time engines. This challenge is immense, because as well as capturing the creative vision of Producers, engaging narrative content must contain rich and nuanced facial expressions, body dynamics, gestures and other complex interactions, for example between a character's skin and their clothing.Directed film-quality animation techniques from the feature film VFX industry can already produce outstanding and compelling character animation. Indeed, a wealth of digitally rich and complex character assets already exist within this domain, even extending to convincing digi-doubles. However, despite there being many parallels with these proven processes, two major technical challenges related to the production of real-time immersive content remain unmet. These arise primarily from the requirement for real-time rendering, as well as the fundamental quantity of animation required for unrestricted viewpoints in immersive. Existing engine-based content therefore nearly always fails to achieve the required level of engagement, in terms of scale or quantity, severely limiting growth of the immersive market.In response, Framestore, a world-leading VFX, CGI and VR/immersive studio, are collaborating with WeightShift, a disruptive software start-up, to overcome these barriers.Through new tools developed for film-quality character asset and performance animation in real-time environments, the project outputs target a step-change in the cost and timescales of film-quality immersive content-creation, and corresponding levels of audience engagement.This highly ambitious collaborative R&D project therefore yields broader impacts on overall UK capabilities across multiple sectors, and capacity to populate the immersive entertainment industry with film-quality animated content."