Snappers Systems' Markerless Face Capture Technology Looks Impressive

Yesterday there was a video of Infinite-Realities 3D scanning capture technique used in conjunction with the Unity 3D game engine. We had our first glimpse at what static high-poly models would look like in Unity's engine. Following up on that, Snapper Systems reminded the gaming community that they, too, have some neat tech to combine with those high-poly models using markerless face capture technology.

Motion Capture Egypt or Snapper Systems, provides high quality 3D face capture technology solutions for commercial and independent purposes. The video above showcases a design technique in which an actor's facial reactions and aspects are captured without the need of camera markers, similar to what we've seen in behind-the-scenes footage from games like Uncharted, Hitman: Absolution or David Cage's Beyond: Two Souls.

One of the major problems with the marker-based toolset for face capture is that you can't capture every single nuance of the face or every single muslce reaction. Team Bondi found a way around this problem by also doing away with markers and using an expensive 360 camera capture setup to record facial reactions and then match them to their appropriate 3D models. The problem with this tactic is that it's unbelievably expensive and very memory hungry.

Snapper Systems method is a lo-fi version of Team Bondi's MotionScan technology. It's basically an identical setup to iPi Soft's markerless, 3D motion capture suite that captures movement from actors in a 3D space without the need of a mo-cap suit or any camera markers, making it an extremely cost-effective method at capturing real-life quality motions without requiring an actual studio or a big budget mo-cap contracting company.

Utilizing tech from Infinite-Realities, Snappers Systems and iPi Soft could easily render a small studio with the necessary tools to not only have high quality performance capture, but it could also provide that same studio with a means for telling a compelling story with cinematics or gameplay on par to what you might find from an AAA sized production company.

I'm totally digging all these different design tools being made available and stepping into the public eye that work as cost-efficient alternatives to some of the other traditional, more expensive methods that the industry has relied on for so long. That's not to mention that with some game budgets bloating up to obscene figures, it's nice to see alternatives made available that curtail the need to rely on the very expensive means that can skyrocket development costs.

You can learn more about some of the art techniques and CG designs from Galal Mohey by visiting his official blog. To check out more information on the markerless face capture technology, feel free to visit their official Facebook page.