FIRA Toolset: Fast Immersive Rigging and Animation

“阻碍沉浸式内容预期增长的一个关键因素是目前由实时引擎支持的角色、生物和表演动画的质量。这一挑战是巨大的，因为除了捕捉制作人的创造性视野外，引人入胜的叙事内容还必须包含丰富而细致的面部表情、身体动态、手势和其他复杂的互动，例如角色的皮肤和服装之间的互动。故事片特效行业的导演电影级动画技术已经可以制作出出色而引人注目的角色动画。事实上，在这个领域已经存在大量数字化和复杂的角色资产，甚至延伸到令人信服的数字替身。然而，尽管这些成熟的过程有许多相似之处，但与实时沉浸式内容制作相关的两个主要技术挑战仍未得到满足。这些主要来自于实时渲染的要求，以及沉浸式中不受限制的视点所需的动画的基本数量。因此，现有的基于引擎的内容几乎总是无法达到所需的参与程度，无论是在规模还是数量上，都严重限制了沉浸式市场的增长。作为回应，世界领先的VFX、CGI和VR/沉浸式工作室Framestore正在与颠覆性软件初创公司WeightShift合作，克服这些障碍。通过为电影质量的角色资产和实时环境中的表演动画开发的新工具，该项目的产出目标是逐步改变电影质量沉浸式内容创作的成本和时间尺度，以及相应的观众参与水平。因此，这个雄心勃勃的合作研发项目对英国多个部门的整体能力产生了更广泛的影响，以及为沉浸式娱乐行业提供电影级动画内容的能力。"

"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."