EPIC GAMES VIRTUAL PRODUCTION WEEK GOES BEHIND THE SCENES WITH PROXI
Epic Games Virtual Production Week spotlighted a behind the scenes of stunt legends, Proxi Virtual Production. Guy Norris and Harrison Norris speak about the filmmaking process for action design and the workflow. The array of footage showcases Reallusion Character Creator digital human actors in many scenes. Watch the video to see the action with Unreal Engine and read on for more about how Character Creator and iClone helped populate and animate Proxi’s action design scenes seen in the video.
Following the filming of The Suicide Squad (2021), Proxi founders Guy Norris and Harrison Norris gave some insight as to how the Reallusion character and animation pipeline fit into their workflow. Proxi is behind the stunts and techviz for action design on movies like The Suicide Squad, Mad Max: Fury Road, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, Netflix’s Triple Frontier, Disney+ The Mandalorian, and more.
PROXi’s Guy Norris and Harrison Norris on incorporating the Reallusion Pipeline and Unreal Engine
“Virtual production is a fast-paced workflow requiring tools that add speed to creativity and integrate effectively with our Unreal Engine pipeline. Character Creator 3 and iClone’s Live Face from Reallusion provide us the speed to create 3D likenesses of the production’s actors, while iClone’s facial animation brings performances to life. Facial mocap with the iPhone using Motion Live allows us to perform and instantly capture face and voice; edit the capture, or punch-in changes on-the-fly. “
“Before Live Face we used very little facial mocap, due to lengthy turnaround times, increased cost, and/or a reliance on external service teams. But thanks to the Reallusion software’s rapid turnaround and ease of use, facial has become a standard part of our toolkit, and will continue to be for all productions in the foreseeable future”
Virtual Production Collaboration and Reallusion
“Virtual Production goes far and away beyond traditional previz, as we empower a creative sandbox approach that’s entirely new. Using Unreal as a backbone, we create entire sequences in 3D space as an unbroken piece of action, that can be adjusted or re-lensed at any time. This sandbox allows the Director, DP, Production Designer, Costume, Editor and all other key-creatives that wish to be involved, to communicate, collaborate and experiment with an evolving version of the sequence to a point of practical refinement, before a single dollar is spent in production. Incorporating the character creation and facial capture suites from Reallusion has allowed us to provide additional creative offerings within this sandbox, while conclusively saving both time and money as an organization.”
Evolving Digital Human Actors with Character Creator and Headshot
“Beginning with our work on Xmen: Dark Phoenix, Character Creator 3 has evolved the way we build our digital actors. With real-time tools and a rigged character base that gives us animation ready models. Prior to Character Creator we worked with sculpting artists and much longer production times, now with Character Creator we can generate all the characters we need, dress them with a wardrobe system and send them directly to Unreal Engine.”
“Being the first studio to pilot the artificial intelligence behind Character Creator 3’s new ‘Headshot’ tool, gave our team a fascinating exploration into producing digital likenesses of our cast from a single photo. Anytime we can combine speed with quality it’s the perfect match for virtual production, and Character Creator 3 is a solution that rapidly populates our scenes with faces and characters, helping the production visualize key moments, well before costly principal photography even begins.”