Newsfilter article unlocker

Anthony Romero, I am the product manager of entertainment and today we bring James Martin or Jimmy, I call him Jimmy. I know him as Jimmy. Anthony Romerio, Wonderful, wonderful professional. I've had the pleasure of working with him for a couple of years. or Jimmy, I call him Jimmy. I know him as Jimmy. Wonderful, wonderful professional. I've had the pleasure of working with on some pretty cool projects and is also professor in practice at CMI or at GSU CMI. Yeah. CMII. All right. Good. So we're going to let Jimmy take this away and give us his presentation, talk to us about using Xsens in the academic world, and then we'll come back for some question and answer time. So, all right, Jimmy, take it away. Great. Thanks, Anthony. Anthony Romero is not only a gem of the mocap industry, but also just an incredible guy. I have had the pleasure of working with Anthony on projects like Electric State for the Russo brothers, and a lot of accents and a lot of link suits along with a lot of stunt performers for that. Typically, what I do is a very awesome role to have in academia as a professor of practice because what that means is I am a professional that works in the industry above and below the line sometimes and also occupying the role as a technical director and a mocap supervisor in most of those capacities the cool part about the professor part of professor in practice is that we bring those workflows into our classroom and we basically support students with fresh and relevant workflows that are meant to enable pipelines whether that's in game design or media entrepreneurship or just general cool animation and cinematics. So the professors of practice here at Georgia State University have that charge and also we're on the hook for producing some of this. And so what makes us alluring to producers and directors and what makes our students capable of working on these large budget multi-million dollar projects is that Georgia State has really had a hand in Innovation at the Creative Media Industries Institute, and I was the very first professor of practice to grace these doors, and we have a great Studio 101 downstairs where students get hands-on with lots of different technology. Some of that is a nurture-based motion capture, both obviously with the Awinda and XSense and the Linksuit with XSens, but we don't stop there. We combine hand solutions, whether that's stretch sense and bringing that in as a Bluetooth data or face solutions like FaceGood and bringing in stereoscopic for full performance capture, because obviously motion capture is the literal backbone of your animation. But bringing those workflows together in tools like iClone from Reallusion or Unreal Engine from Epic Games is something that we hold near and dear to our own workflows, both in the industry and in the classroom. And so as you can see here, this is what the CMI looks like on the outside. It was made possible by a $27 million grant by the Woodruff Foundation eight years ago for Georgia State, and we've transformed the Ord SunTrust Bank headquarters into a media center that rivals those out there at higher end and Ivy League schools, where you can involve yourself with a game jam or maybe find yourself on stage with somebody doing volumetric or optical motion capture. You might find yourself doing virtual camera and VFX work. And of course, we've had a lot of different productions here like 21 Pilots for Roblox. So you might be working on some platforms that you might go home and play. And how do we connect our students to that? Well, that's pretty easy. We do that by, again, bringing in professors of practice like myself. And I've got a few different titles under my belt, working with Keanu Reeves and Replicas, also James Gunn, or as I like to call him, Jaime Pistolas, and Suicide Squad, and realizing 16 stunt sequences with second unit director Guy Norris and Proxy BP, along with Actor Capture. And the Actor Capture Crew has also taken on major projects for other major distribution networks like Disney, Netflix, and the BBC recently, to name a few. So when students hear about these kinds of projects, they get really excited. And really, their portfolios help us guide who is actually technically ready to set life experience. So how we do that is through our MFA in virtual production, our BA in game design, our B.A. in game development, and our BIS in media entrepreneurship. And essentially, these degree paths offer many different opportunities to take classes like 3D animation or visual effects. And now we're even offering new courses that will soon be released with AI as a major focus in the way that we produce or the way that we use our motion in our animation. Students are learning that hands-on. We use a lot of Reallusion tools when we start animating characters. And you need somewhere for your data to go, right? Like, otherwise, it's just a skeleton. So we typically will bring in high-end avatars from Character Creator, utilizing things like Accurig for other bespoke characters that might come from other engines or other pipelines, so we can quickly get those moving as well, head-to-toe. But our students are able to make digital doubles of themselves fairly accurately, as you can see above with one of our great students, Josh Perry, that I've had the pleasure of working with on a couple of sets as well recently. And essentially that likeness for that digital entity or that NIL, if you will, for the name, image and likeness of these student athletes are very much something that we supplement with a lot of really high fidelity data. And why do we choose XSense? Well, a long time ago, once upon a time, I worked with this really crazy guy named Jon Stewart up in a little town called Red Bank, New Jersey, and also Burbank, California, where we were playing around with a lot of different tools. And we really needed to have the highest fidelity possible. And I'm going to drop a name that's even cooler than Jon Stewart, Alistair McLeod. I know you're out there with pill capture and me and Alistair hung back and he turned me on to some really, really awesome new ways to animate characters with inertia-based mocap. For those of you that might be new to inertia- based motion capture, that's an accelerometer, a gyroscope, and a magnetometer. And each one of those sensors are contained inside of each one of those IMUs or inertia measurement units. That's really the key to XS, being able to apply those sensors to these avatars, to these body types, to these actors, and be arbiters of this performance. So we love Reallusion tools for that. And every once in a while, I might animate a medic human if you really ask me not. iClone 8 is my sandbox. I was the first certified trainer inside of the United States, and I've been with iClones since version one. I love this tool because it is my Swiss army knife of animation. So when we talk about data stream aggregation, motion live, forget about it. You're just going to, Choose your profile. Assign it to your avatar. It doesn't matter which technology you're using, which gloves, which suits, which data stream are you using to animate your characters. And that's really important. And workflow is important to us, both as academics and as professionals. And as you can see, that starts with our motion capture. And that could be excellence. And that is really where we like to go. And why do we use inertia-based motion capture? Well, it's easy to calibrate. It's easy to suit up. And it's the highest quality data. So why do we work with people like Jon Stewart? How are we capturing high-end STUT sequences for James Gunn or 400 robots for the Russo brothers? Well, it's because we really depend on the fidelity of the link suit and the flexibility of that network. But our workflow starts with our motion capture, then goes into our DCC of choice or of our client's choice. And of course, HD processing is a big step in that. Why do we love NBN? Well, that HD processing has more than just a solve. And recognizing that ground plane and really cleaning up any kind of jitter or smoothness that needs to be established inside of your data is pretty much going to be in a batch export capacity. And so it's great when you have a couple of motions that you're getting for a cinematic or maybe for a trailer or something like that. But when you have to deliver 5,000 motions to a high-end vendor like Digital Domain or Industrial Light & Magic, well, you better be sure your data is solid. And we also know that that is 100% where we can retarget inside of iClone and we can apply that via Motion Live to these avatars. You can see some of our student examples of work over here. And one of my favorites coming from one of my current students, Aloris, who's got Camilla in a fallout capacity. Now, Accuphase is something that I love to add to excess data, and I cannot stress enough how flexible this is for our students. They can jump in our AR cave, which is basically three infinite walls of projection screens with short throw Christies here, F-B-C-M-I-I, and we can set up some nice airy lights some sky panels we can jump in and if you look really closely you'll notice that that's again iClone on screen data streaming and aggregating that facial performance but we can do that in multi different frame rates coming through AccuFace you can do this live and real time which is my favorite because on a real-time animator but you also can do THIS in post so Can you take a face good and get a stereoscopic and infrared, high-quality facial animation, drive it through AccuFace with your XSense data and bring that to life inside of iClone? Absolutely. And we do it all the time. And not only do we, so do our students. And the access that our students have to these tools is really cheap because some other institutions might keep their highest-end technology or their most expensive technology behind closed doors. And that's a problem for students. But here at Georgia State University, we empower our student body with so many different tools and so many different options and space and sound stages and caves and other awesome places for them to actually perform and get their data. So, face is a big part of that, and we love AccuFace for it. Now, my first class I'd like to focus on is kind of my hello world to 3D animation and specifically character animation. Why character animation? Well, we definitely can go back to the days of the bouncing ball and the walk cycle and the Rube Goldberg. But essentially, all of those principles are fundamentals that don't really get you down the road with character animation. And in my module one, the game design concept short, I unapologetically completely rip off Temple Run and show students that you have a very simple character interaction. And that introduces motion for our hero character for both idle, runs, jumps. Arguably the most three common motions that you're going to find in a game. So if you're utilizing accents to get some of your motions for your cinematic, you're probably getting some idles. You're probably giving some jumps and you're getting some runs. But I also ask my students to then get Accurig and go ahead and bring through a different character not originating in character creator or CC. But from a different tool altogether, whether that's something that they've modeled or something that they've attempted to put together in their ZBrush classes, or if there's something that they really just need to refine more as a character and need to see it move and need to see that motion happen. So that player two also is animated to show the interaction between characters. And students are turned on to nonlinear editing in a way that is easy to absorb a ramp in for people who have never touched animation before and certainly gets characters moving right away now i love angel alonzo's work and his avatars are straight out of the fortnite playbook but again are bespoke to his art style and his character creator that's driving that design that's awesome because you basically can create any character and apply this module one sort of functionality and this is also where camera lensing comes in because what's motion capture without action and that's basically different angles that they're able to camera switch inside of icon which is another non-linear editing tool that you'll find on the timeline or the dope sheet and essentially you can pick and choose your camera angles and you don't have to jump out to Premiere or to a video editor to get really nice cinematic work from the motion and follow the action all the way through the scene. Students are encouraged to do this week two. So they're animating right away. Why do I like real-time animation and why do I claim real- time and why is it super awesome that MVN allows you to network stream into tools like I clone? Well, that's because the creative interests that you'll find on set are also the same creative interests you'll also find in the classroom. And the reason that we embrace this innovation here at Georgia State is because, again, being arbiters of this performance for our students is equally as important as being arbitERS of the performance for people like Joe Bauer, the father of dragons from Game of Thrones and Elf and hanging with Harryhausen and stuff. But we did Lyle Lyle Crocodile with Joe. And Joe is the great wonder of things. If you're out there, Joe, I love you. And essentially, every time that that crocodile needed to jump in a cab or crawl through a tunnel or ride a cycle cart across a bridge in Central Park, well, that's a mocap ask. That's a very specific technical ask. And my former assistant was right there and ready to basically um throw everything aside run to micro center throw a wi-fi backpack together with our ubiquity long range routers get that 5g signal for our creative interests and when producers and directors really need that they need workers and technical artists that understand these tools in a non-linear fashion and understand how to get this on rig. In that particular case, that was coming from MPC and D-Neg, and we were able to work with Method with their previs, and we really got some awesome stuff together on set for Javier Bardem to sing and dance to. And it all starts with CMIS 4160 and 3D animation, because this, again, is a hello world to characters, and character animation specifically. But we don't stop there. we move forward each student has to come up with their own concept and this one my good friend ian chase who is a absolutely very accomplished 3d artist at a early level in his career so if anybody's out looking for a amazing animator and also game designer you'll probably find ian ready to help you out this is also his digital devil and for his concept he did roof runner so essentially it's a guy jumping over roots doing a little parkour and he utilized character creator and also accurate to create that and that logo is also adobe firefly so we inject ai directly into the classroom at the graphic design level with module one in 3d animation here at the cmi high so if that sounds interesting to you that's just class number one and that's you can find with me basically registering in the spring or the fall and i even teach that one on summer online session so check that out if you're interested um in module two of the same class we get in the crowd sim now again motion capture right there is a great source for you to have a wide variety of different idols and motions that are moving through a scene so module one turns you on to player one player two and definitely gets that interaction happen however module two gets you animating many characters quickly. And so basically, crowd simulation inside of iClone is extremely robust, utilizing Motion Director. I cannot stress enough, it's so easy to animate so many characters. And with your actor pools and with your motion or IMDs, so iMotionDirector files, you can trigger multiple sets of motions. You can go deep level with being able to walk or navigate a scene and just this semester i gave my students a one-day challenge to animate a character working through an entire maze so for you inception fans out there you know that that circle maze is much harder than your square maze uh but my good friend jeff jasper from oh the fruit company that he works for and uh formerly uh you know doing crazy jobs like Inception understand this concept and not easy for animators to navigate. However, with motion director and crown simulation, what if I told you that you could navigate that entire character with clicks and seconds? And my good friend Lance Barton stopped by class the other day and was showing him a little bit of the animation that our students are able to do in weeks five and asking him, hey, as a pro level animator, how is this something that you would have implemented? Or how long will it take you to conquer this maze? Well, we make students fast and effective. And if you've ever been on a movie set, you better be fast and affected. So again, we're trying to usher in these tried and true fundamentals for what makes you effective on set as a technical artists, but also how to handle the data, whether it's one character, 10 characters, 100 characters, or if you're doing some sort of math. Okay, so character creator also can supplement that, but these can be bespoke characters that fully can take advantage of motion director and module two. So crowd simulation and generation is something that we get right into. So now you're animating lots of characters. Of course, Xsense is a great source for this data. So if I need to bring my students into the studio and say, hey, think about what your crowd sim is. Is it a basketball game? Is it a dance routine? Is it a music video, which I'm rendering right now right off screen because these tools empower you to be fast and effective. So when my favorite hip-hop artist, A-Soft Rock, dropped a surprise album last week, well, I'm able to take my motion capture animation and get that directly into the scene, just like my students scan. So we're quick on the upkeep of the actual data and the cleaning or solving of that data and then the application of the other tools, fingers and face as needed. And this is something that they can implement in module two in CMIS 4160. Got first time animators every semester, right? We're talking young animators, new to the game. This was one such animator who came to me from South Korea and fell in love with iCologne. And really, we had a chance to spend some time in Seoul with the Ministry of Technology and Science. Thank you very much, K-Meta. And essentially, we were able to bring over the performance capture workshop directly to industry professionals also in Seoul. So do our students and our workflows and our curriculum make worldwide impacts on the industry. I think it's fair to say that those actor capture and CMI can confirm that. And XSense and Movella and NBN are right at the heart of that for every plane that I get on and stuff a link through my overhead. But our students have the ability to create these assets as well. And you'll see that I have some examples for each one of these slides. I'm happy to share those later if you're more interested in seeing more animation from Creative Media Industries Institute students. But Module 3 is my favorite. It's probably easy to see why. Because this is where motion capture retargeting really is the challenge. And this is basically a constraint where a swordsman has a right-handed grip, but also has hands coming on and off sporadically of that hilt. And as he fights, our students have to interpret what is this character, what is my enemy, and how can I use these constraints within that nonlinear editing environment and reach targets to maintain that performance that that stunt performer spent many takes getting right and one take for a select. So when the director or the professor says that's the take, then that's the take that needs to be retargeted and cleaned in Module 3, the Motion Capture Retargeting Training Module, that takes real performances that we also get from actual performers in our mo-cap workshops, which some of you may have been privy to, and if you haven't seen those, you can check out www.motioncaptureworkshop.com. And you can see that we basically will open the doors for performers to come in and both learn what is an extents link suit, how to string, and then properly assess that sensor placement, calibration, then of course, performance and blocking. And we've worked with many different movement troops and probably most notably and recently Terry Notary and all you crazy robots Devin and Adam and Chris and Gabby all of you were such a pleasure to see bring each one of those robots to life opposite Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt and Terry Notary is definitely for my money Mr. Mocap even though that's what it says on the back of my license plate however terry is mr movement and he's doing great workshops out there right now and when you have these kinds of data sets and you have people in link suits and you've got really high fidelity data you don't want to skimp on the performance the lensing and certainly the character application so i get everything from my students from star wars to fallout to many different interpretations. Most recently, I even had a throwback Halo one, which is pretty cool. I had to tell them who Paul Marino and Bill Rice were, but don't worry, fellas. Enrique Grove, if you're out there, I'm listening for you too, my friend. So CMIS 4160 is definitely that intro level, and this also allows students to jump in the suits themselves. As you can see, Sam Sword and my buddy Jose here both jumped in those Alendas and were able to do their entire cinematics for their game high noon. And this is something that they've already graduated with, but they came out of Game Engine Pipeline. Professor Max Thomas, a partner in crime and definitely, wow, a mutant never even considered for mass production, but brilliant, brilliant. Virtual production and VFX professor that we also have here at the CMII. And this is his course for 4155 Game Engine Pipeline that allows students to take this all the way through and actually author a game for our demo day that we have at the end of each semester, where we invite in all of our industry connections, producers, directors, storyboard artists, animators, and lots of different people from around Atlanta, and you might even find somebody like Lamar Jackson throwing passes here, or we've had Jerry Rice for the Super Bowl. Lots of different folks that come in and out for motion capture specifically, and our students are able to showcase that, and so you can see Sam and Julia Wilson and her group and lots of our other students are here and able to firsthand give you gameplay, give you the breakdown of what the game is altogether, and then also answer any questions about the production process or their Unreal authoring or how they got it on Steam. So that's a really valuable tool for them. Again, Ian Chase also found himself in that class and he utilized Icon in a really cool way. And he used hand animation that switched the game mode. And that was animated inside of Icon, brought inside of Unreal Engine and really refined there. And also each one of those guys cast themselves in the game because they made themselves a character creator as a digital double. It didn't look like a cousin of a metahuman, but it did look like them, and that's pretty cool. So, Project Obscura had a great playthrough, and again, this is stuff that you can check out, but at the MFA level, we do this for a master's in fine arts as well, and you'll find Professor Martin to be bringing in those workflows for our master's students, and pre-vis is a big So when I was on replicas, the very first thing I got when I landed in San Juan was the boards. And that became the shop Bible for stunt sequences, water landings and many different things. And then also a virtual performer called 345. And I won't say 6-7, but 345 was the name of the robot in that film that we needed to use inertia based motion capture for. But when we get those boards, we have to interpret that. interpret that. And directors like Jeffrey Nachmanoff, who was the director of movies like Day After Tomorrow, on replicas really wanted that previs to ring true to an animatic that was animated that he could actually lens. And of course, real-time animation and icon delivered that. But how did we do that through inertia-based motion capture once again? So when Keanu needed to visualized macro to micro on scene, which he told me he did in Johnny Mnemonic already, and sure enough, he did. However, we did that so Jeffrey could call those motions out on set, and Keanu would know what he was talking about because we had already visualized that, utilizing accents and Cinema 4D and some X-particles. A pre-visualization also allows students to interpret boards for not just characters but for uh objects animated scenes level design and certainly um that has to also be true to form uh true to composition and we stand very strongly on that whether that's a helicopter flying through the sky or troops running across a battlefield um we make sure that all of those animation fundamentals and principles are there uh to also accompany that motion capture and really make that scene and that set design and that pre-visualization exactly what should be for creative interest as it goes through the pre-production phase. We're working with the godfather of storyboarding, Mark Simon, next semester. So he's got over 7,000 IMDB credits, y'all. It's kind of crazy. And our students get access directly to that here at the CMII. So we're going to be bringing in his boards. We'll going to be animating that. We're going to be motion capturing that, and we're going to be showcasing that at our demo day for the spring semester 2026. Also, you're not going to see him eat any spaghetti, but you might find Will Smith in some of our work. This actually was animated by former assistant, former co-founder, and student at the time, Joel Mack, and essentially he also gave an ending to the Chris Rock slap story that was found around the world. How did he do that? Again, motion capture and making sure good character design followed that up through his pre-visualization. He was not only able to interpret the boards for the movies, but he was also able to give his own twist on an ending. So we love when our students are creative and create portfolio work. I also teach senior game design portfolio. And sometimes students have really spent the time and effort it takes to get through the game design program and all of the work that goes into Unreal Engine or Unity to supplement their work. However, that portfolio really has to shine. So we have a real commitment to making sure that portfolio pieces like module one, two, and three inside of 3D animation exist for our students to be able to build that portfolio as they come out of the Creative Media Industries Institute and move into the field. Pre-visualization is a great part of that. But advanced visual effects is another area where we really focus our master students' time and effort. And that yields some amazing work, both coming out of CMII and also collaborating with the industry. So a good friend and alumni, Tom Luce, executive director of The Walking Dead, Billy the Kid, so much other cool stuff that bring in rejuvenation here into the student-led production of that particular film. And visual effects was handled completely by our students. And why are they able to do that? Because at the master's level and trickling down through the undergrad, through project work in the studio, they really have the ability to take on lots of different roles and certainly wear lots of different technical hats, which when I came up, being a generalist was a bad word. But now these days, it's very commonplace for production artists to be generalists and be able to wield multiple skills. So advanced visual effects is one of those. And for me, I literally, as you probably can see, you can talk all day long about character animation, motion capture, inertia-based motion capture specifically. But I would like to take a second before we open up the Q&A to thank Mobella and really for supporting our students and supporting our film industry with tools that allow us to be quick and nimble on set to disappear behind first unit and sip coffee at crafty while we get good data and also to empower our students and bring in a tool that allows them to literally personify these performances and these characters and that is something that when i first saw an window and I first try to link suit I knew would be a game changer not only for me as an animator and me as a as a capture artist but for everybody who had that aspiration and about almost 20 years ago I did a little video for some guys that I love dearly the bc boys and my good buddy mix master mic and essentially um i still had to bring in that old school 3ds max uh keyframe animation and had i had a link suit then i can't imagine what it will look like