DIGIHUMAN is a 24 month industrial research project to research, develop and demonstrate new ways for creative professionals to create realistic virtual animated humans at higher quality and more cost effectively, for the burgeoning VR/AR content market and also traditional uses in movies, TV, video games, education, fashion, social, architecture etc. The immersive nature of VR/AR and higher resolution displays is driving the demand for more believable virtual humans to support the suspension of disbelief. The partnership brings together Europe's largest Visual Effects company (Double Negative) and a world leading specialist in physics simulation for Character Effects and video games (Numerion Software). The research project will deliver a set of technical software solutions that address the need for higher quality, more efficient, virtual human production that can be used by Double Negative to be more competitive in their VFX and Animated film production and by Numerion for new products that it can market worldwide.
NREAL is an eighteen-month applied research project that aims to develop new ways of combining live action
video, CGI and other assets, in real time, at very high quality. The approach is based on the combination of
industry leading professional augmented reality technology with a games engine (enhanced to handle live
video and camera system metadata), with a pipeline that can automatically integrate assets from a film or TV
VFX workflow. The project will create the first professional video-based VFX pipeline designed to run in a games
engine. The resulting system will be designed for use in live broadcast TV, episodic TV, and movie VFX
production, with downstream application to AR/VR experiences.
The project consortium is made up of an SME augmented reality technology developer (Ncam), the UK
subsidiary of the manufacturer of a world-leading games engine (Epic) and Europe’s largest VFX company
(DNeg).
CISE is a one-year project designed to create a cross-industry digital security environment with an extensible,
pluggable framework, to protect the UK’s companies making movies, TV, commercials, games, on-line and
immersive media.
The goal is to create a ‘digital immune system’ for media companies, which will constantly watch for and warn
against both internal and external security threats, tailor security systems automatically to meet client
requirements and threat levels, and immediately shut down and repair systems should any breach occur. The
outputs will be Open Source security toolkits and templates; a managed security service from Sohonet based
on Open Standards; a draft security specification for the digital media industries; and best practice guidance.
The consortium brings together the UK’s three largest media facilities / VFX houses, together with Sohonet –
the pioneering professional community-of-interest network for the television, film and media production
industry – and an SME facility house.
ASAP is a two-year project to research, develop and demonstrate a new pipeline, tools and processes for rendering and reviewing CGI and video-based media, at appropriate levels of quality for real-time, interaction-time and near-line use cases. The results will facilitate the cross-media creation and use of assets for film, TV and games and compress the present stages of preproduction, production and postproduction, eliminating the need to re-create assets from scratch for different uses.
The project will advance the state of the art in asset preparation, scalable dynamic rendering and shaders, production visualisation, lighting interaction, real-time combination of 2D and 3D assets, and the unification of media processing pipelines. It will deliver a range of new tools, applications, software and production services.
The project is a large-scale cross-industry initiative by a consortium comprising the UK’s largest VFX company (DNeg), three world-leading SMEs specialising in media technology creation (FilmLight, Ncam and The Foundry), and the UK’s leading independent games developer (Rebellion).
Movie making is changing from a two-dimensional process (in which scenes are shot on a camera and ‘composited’ as 2D layers) to one that combines digital video, computer-generated models, animations and effects in a three-dimensional world. This increases the director’s creative freedom, and supports the production of both 2D and 3D stereo versions, but is very technically demanding.
SyMMM is developing ways to capture and process many kinds of metadata from video streams, photographs, laser scans and other measurements to support 3D approaches to movie making. The project will advance the state of the art in 3D video and automatic metadata extraction. It will lead to new methods and tools for blockbuster movie production, using multimodal metadata to control the way that scenes are put together and to help the creative team to visualise what is happening.
The project leader is SME technology developer FilmLight, which won four ‘technical Oscars’ in 2010 and the Queen’s Award for Innovation in 2012. The project partners are Double Negative, Europe’s largest visual effects company (winner of the 2011 Oscar, as 2011 and 2012 BAFTAs for best VFX) and the University of Surrey.