The GDC 2018 is behind us, but we are still processing everything that happened in its halls. After the fabulous raytracing demonstration with the short film Star Wars Reflections, comes Siren. Who is Siren? A “digital human” created by Epic Games, 3Lateral, Cubic Motion, Tencent and Vicon, whose movements were captured and rendered in real time on the Unreal Engine.
The Pursuit of Realism
Real time. Virtual reality. Greater realism in character designs, environments, lighting, and physics. I think the pattern is quite clear. The goal at the latest Game Developers Conference has been to narrow the gap that separates the “real” from the “digital,” and the major names in the market are working very hard on it. It all started with the Star Wars Reflections demo that showed us the potential of raytracing in real time... as long as we ignore the detail that it (still) needs $60,000 in hardware. That demo was part of Epic Games’ Project Spotlight, but to be honest, it wasn’t alone. In addition to raytracing, Unreal Engine has made great strides in the generation of virtual avatars and motion capture, which became evident thanks to Siren:
Technically, Epic Games is not the only name behind Siren. 3Lateral and Cubic Motion also participated, two companies remembered for their solid work in Hellblade, the Chinese giant Tencent, and the folks at Vicon. Siren is actually a digital clone of actress Bingjie Jiang, while Alexa Lee was in charge of the mocap. Beyond certain details like the imperfections of the skin, the behavior of the eyes, and the density of the hair, what stands out here is the fluidity of the motion capture (I recommend playing the video at 60 FPS). Everything was done in real time, feeding the data generated by Alexa directly into the model of Bingjie within Unreal Engine.
Even so... Siren is not perfect. The mouth movements are irregular, and something doesn’t quite fit with the arms, but these are aspects that can be optimized with patience and work. The future is very promising. Developers have formidable tools, and we can’t wait to meet the next generation of games. All we need is graphics cards at reasonable prices. Please?
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