With Reallusion’s “Scan to Animation” character creation pipeline, 3D scan studios and professionals can transform scanned images into fully-rigged, AI-controllable avatars.
3D scanned people are widely used to create visualizations in many industries beyond games and films. From manufacturing, business, archviz, to digital twins and media entertainment, 3D scanned people are key elements to bringing simulations closer to realism, making any virtual scenario more convincing.
Thousands of 3D people can be easily found online. As realistic as they look, most 3D characters tend to lack the natural movement of real human beings, either in static poses, emotionless faces, or stiff body animations. How to transform scanned people into naturally animated subjects requires not only skills and experience, but also the right technology for character creation.
Reallusion, the developer of iClone and Character Creator, now offers a new “Scan to Animation Pipeline”, adding details, realism, and performance to scanned images. In collaboration with The Scan Truck, a Hollywood-based 3D scanning service company, and ICVR, a global creative and digital production studio, Reallusion has successfully turned scanned models into lively animated 3D characters that are fully controllable which can be exported to major 3D tools for any productions.
Scan Experts Meet Leaders in Character Creation
Located in Los Angeles the heart of the American entertainment industry – The Scan Truck and ICVR have partnered with major Hollywood studios and international corporations including Warner Brothers, FOX, Universal Studio, SONY pictures, Apple, Netflix, and many more; to create avatars and digital content for famous films, games, and marketing campaigns. Their recent successes include creating digital doubles for Grand Theft Auto 5, Xbox video games, and feature films including Marvel’s Black Window, Dune, and Terminator: Dark Fate.
It was an instant click between The Scan Truck, ICVR, and Reallusion, each with a long list of credentials on character creations. Impressed by the character creation technology of Reallusion’s “Scan to Animation Pipeline”, and with little hesitation, The Scan Truck and ICVR took part in a new 3D character creation workflow with Reallusion.
From recruiting 15 people for a shooting day inside their studio truck in LA, The Scan Truck captured the likeness of each model using their high-end scanning technology.
Next, a multidisciplinary team of technologists, artists, and engineers in ICVR constructed the scanned images into high-quality 3D models through detailed data processing.
We as content creators feel the pain of people out there, having these high-quality models but not accessible for most usages,” said Chris Swiatek, Chief of Product, ICVR. “It is fantastic to see our 3D content turned into vivid 3D characters with controllable animation and deployed in a wide range of applications beyond games and films. We’re very excited to be among the early testers of this pipeline and to see the increased efficiency it brings to art production as a whole.
From Creation to Content Animation – Reallusion Redefines 3D Characters
Constantly evolving their products to keep pace with next-generation technology while providing unique implementations that adapt their tools to all levels of creators; Reallusion is setting a new industry standard for real-time character creation. The company’s “Scan to Animation Pipeline” provides the highest realism and control over 3D people, aiming to effectively level up business visualization for archviz, digital twins (manufacturing, construction), traffic, and crowd simulations. At the same time, the new pipeline synchronizes with the rapid growth of real-time visualization offered by GPU and game engines including NVIDIA Omniverse™.
Deploying its advanced technology on facial and body rigging, morphing, and lip-sync animations, Reallusion’s new pipeline can generate two unique outputs from 3D scanned images:
actorORIGIN: High-res Digital Humans from Character Creator
These ultra-realistic digital humans deliver the highest details for close-up performances, fully customizable with hair, facial and body morph, skin layers, and outfit systems that are suitable for real-time film and AAA game projects. Character Creator’s native character format (CC3+) involves a large number of assets including body shapes, appearances, outfits, and accessories for mixing and matching.
ActorSCAN: Photo-realistic 3D People for Crowd Rendering
The one-mesh, fully-dressed lightweight models are designed to enliven business simulations with fully rigged, controllable, true-to-life digital crowds. These models can be worked with facial expressions and lip-sync animations that make them suitable from long to medium camera ranges.
Live Scanned Actors on Any Stage Productions
Reallusion animated 3D avatars are fully compatible with thousands of AAA quality motions available on ActorCore – Reallusion’s premium online 3D asset library, allowing one character to be used for multiple applications. (business, training, archviz, films, games) All content is compatible with major 3D programs including Unreal Engine, Unity, Blender, Maya, MotionBuilder, 3ds Max, Cinema4D, and iClone .
Join the Incredible “Scan to Animation” Pipeline
With a never-ending passion to bring CG characters to life, Reallusion is looking for partners who excel in 3D scanning and character design to join ActorCore. Enabling designers from all backgrounds to easily enliven their game, movie, and interactive projects with rich asset selections. Contact marketing@reallusion.com for more information.
