THE MAKING OF
How Foundation Imaging creates a 30 minute live-action show, all in 3D, every week.   By Erik Holsinger

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ATTACK FROM ABOVE:
2.7 Mbyte QuickTime Movie
Click on the image to see this scene from Starship Troopers

Inside the Vicon Stage: The 40 X 40 motion capture stage with its 14 cameras allows Foundation to quickly animate a variety of stunts.

As you were, Trooper. A Foundation-ite decides to ask for a raise "Troopers style" on Foundation's Ascension motion capture stage.

Most of the camera moves and [virtual cinematography] are done by the individual animators, usually in phase with the storyboard. According to Scheetz, much of the Foundation "look" is attributable to John Allardice, who did a trailer for an in-house project called "Vortex."

"He in a lot of ways set the standard for the way that Foundation handles shows like 'Starship Troopers,' " Scheetz said. "John is now working on our HDTV pilot 'The Universe and Harry Morgan,' but the style that he set has trickled down to all the animators working on the 'Troopers' project."

Manic Motion Capture
Due to the sheer volume of animation that each team must produce, the animators at Foundation rely heavily on motion capture systems. According to Scheetz, Foundation uses two systems on two separate stages; the Ascension system on a 10 X 10 foot stage for closeup work, and a Vicon system on a huge warehouse space for group shots. The Vicon system is impressive; according to Bryant, Foundation has the largest Vicon stage in the world. With 14 cameras that cover over a 40 X 40 foot space, it is easy to believe. Both the Vicon and the Acension system are fed into a Kaydara FilmBox, and then ported over to LightWave for final animation.

Motion control typically has had problems with extraneous data, but Bryant says that cleanup is minimal. "We do very, very little clean-up with [the Vicon data]," said Bryant. "The beauty of the system is that we can do multi-capture, so we can do a lot more stunt work with this. This gives you much, much more detailed motion data than the magnetic system. But the magnetic system is so easy and so quick to set up now that it's hard to walk away from it." Just how fast is fast when it comes to their motion capture? "We can literally create motion data here at 9 o'clock in the morning, and at 11 o'clock it can be on the [Foundation Imaging server] stack rendering."