Animation The Most Realistic 3d Girls

Have a look at the updated version of Saya, which was animated with the help of mocap tech from Toei.

Back in October 2016, we’ve reported about a very interesting project from a duo of Japanese 3d artists. The project is called Saya (make sure to follow the Twitter as well). It’s a modern take on a hyper-realistic 3d character, which the authors themselves call ‘virtual human’. At the end of August 2017, Yuka Ishikawa and Teruyuki Ishikawa published a new video, which shows the impressive amount of work they’ve done over the last year.

The video features the virtual girl Saya showing a wide variety of different emotions. The character design looks similar to what we’ve seen before, but the animations take it to a whole other level. The animations here are not done by hand, but are captured by Kanaya Mikii and Hiroki Kinoshita, who serve as Motion Capture Specialists on this project. The company Zukun Labs is helping out a lot with this project, as well as Toei Animation Institute (if our Google Translate skills serve us right). The girl also took part in some contest in Japan Miss ID 2018. She even made it to the semifinals there.

To capture this animation and make it all work in real-time the developers are using Dynamixyz Performer 2 SV system. They have also used some pretty complex unique capturing equipment to make the capture. 

Since the initial publication, the project was already featured in a number of events including CeBIT 2017 and Visual Computing / Graphics and CAD Joint Symposium 2017.

CGWORLD actually has a pretty interesting article about the production of this animation, but alas it’s all in Japanese. If there are some community members, who can help us understand some of the workflow details – please mention in the comments.