#2: Dynamic Gaussian Splats - Dance Revolution
Controlled Movement Inside a Capture Rig - streamlining the handling of a high-volume of images
We first encountered photographer/director Edmund Fraser and his collaborator Christie Lau through the buzz generated around their commercial work, including a celebrated campaign for Dr Martens with Nine Inch Nails, featuring dancers captured using Gaussian splats (below).
Edmund uses a self-built rig of 44 consumer-level Canon DSLR cameras, which can be disassembled and reassembled in any studio location and triggered simultaneously using a remote control.
Christie then takes the resulting images and aligns them using a range of software tools, to create complete 3D images. After seeing Edmund and Christies’ work we began a conversation about the possibility of adding movement to his captures: enter the CoSTAR prototyping team.
Edmund arranged for a choreographer and a team of dancers to join us at a studio in North London and set up his rig to capture the dancers in various stages of motion.
We collaborated around the development of a shared ‘best practice’ post-production workflow and methodology – streamlining the handling of a high-volume of images, automating Jawset PostShot ingest for training purposes and the sequencing and alignment of resultant Gaussian Splats for animation in Unreal Engine. This produced a dataset that we could manipulate and animate, using Edmund and Christie’s signature stilted motion style. A short sequence (below) shows the output of this collaboration, with music composition from Andrew Beaton.
