VoluMagic
Lead Participant:
THE FOUNDRY VISIONMONGERS LTD.
Abstract
"VoluMagic is a collaborative, 18 month, Industrial Research Project that brings together Foundry (Technology Expert) and Happy Finish (content creator) to develop new tools that will progress the current state of live-action immersive content.
Today's content creators are well used to using compositing applications to create 2D content. With the increase in demand for immersive experiences it is more complex and time consuming to create this content with the tools currently available. This is due to the need to manipulate even larger datasets and to use multiple complex tools for the extensive clean-up that is required to make this dataset usable. The high cost of creating the immersive content does not make these projects viable for the creative practitioners.
VoluMagic's vision enables content creators to manipulate volumetric datasets in the well known compositing application that they already use, Foundry's Nuke. This innovative approach will maintain and enhance an existing workflow enabling minimal disruption to the artist. It also democratises the creation of immersive content by removing the need for specialist knowledge of additional volumetric data tools.
Live-action volumetric datasets (excluding 3D artists models) present unique challenges: imperfect capture systems produce over-smoothed, noisy or incomplete results; these capture and reconstruction systems are often proprietary and artists are given the end results without control of the process; even when users have access to the original data they are faced with large quantity of images that are difficult to handle on current computers.
The overall focus of the project is it's key innovation, to re-conceptualize the volume reconstruction and editing process as an image editing one. Since volumetric datasets are mostly constructed from images, and can be used to produce other image types, compositors (2D artists) should be best positioned to handle this data within Nuke. However, existing videogrammetry tools are designed with 3D artists in mind, which adds considerable time to VFX pipelines. Our solution will allow studios to reduce turnaround times and therefor cut costs."
Today's content creators are well used to using compositing applications to create 2D content. With the increase in demand for immersive experiences it is more complex and time consuming to create this content with the tools currently available. This is due to the need to manipulate even larger datasets and to use multiple complex tools for the extensive clean-up that is required to make this dataset usable. The high cost of creating the immersive content does not make these projects viable for the creative practitioners.
VoluMagic's vision enables content creators to manipulate volumetric datasets in the well known compositing application that they already use, Foundry's Nuke. This innovative approach will maintain and enhance an existing workflow enabling minimal disruption to the artist. It also democratises the creation of immersive content by removing the need for specialist knowledge of additional volumetric data tools.
Live-action volumetric datasets (excluding 3D artists models) present unique challenges: imperfect capture systems produce over-smoothed, noisy or incomplete results; these capture and reconstruction systems are often proprietary and artists are given the end results without control of the process; even when users have access to the original data they are faced with large quantity of images that are difficult to handle on current computers.
The overall focus of the project is it's key innovation, to re-conceptualize the volume reconstruction and editing process as an image editing one. Since volumetric datasets are mostly constructed from images, and can be used to produce other image types, compositors (2D artists) should be best positioned to handle this data within Nuke. However, existing videogrammetry tools are designed with 3D artists in mind, which adds considerable time to VFX pipelines. Our solution will allow studios to reduce turnaround times and therefor cut costs."
Lead Participant | Project Cost | Grant Offer |
|---|---|---|
| THE FOUNDRY VISIONMONGERS LTD. | £268,767 | £ 161,260 |
Participant |
||
| HAPPY FINISH LIMITED | £88,356 | £ 53,014 |
People |
ORCID iD |
| Peri Friend (Project Manager) |