It seems like a pretty expensive setup.

BR: Each motion capture camera is about $20,000 apiece.

AM: This system is not nearly as expensive as you'd think. This is most often used by churches and such. They'll have multiple cameras set up and they'll webcast their services and videotape their services for later use.

BR: Welcome to the church of motion capture!

How many actors can you do simultaneously?

BR: We've done thirteen. We haven't hit the upper limit; we've just done what we've needed to do.

Do you service all of SCEA?

BR: Yes.

What about the worldwide studios?

BR: We're an asset that the worldwide studios can utilize as well. We're all starting to work together -- America, Europe, and Japan. This is the most significant motion capture resource we have on the planet, and we're trying to tie as many resources into it as we can.

AM: And the Anycast is something we're trying to leverage to make us more of a reasonable use for people who are far away, even if they're in the States, so they don't have to fly a team over.

BR: Normally when you're doing a large project, you'll be over for three weeks to acquire all of your data. For Rise to Honor we were twelve weeks. It's too many people to fly away from their families, so this is a way we can all do it, and it's not too big of a stressor on folks.

BR: Those are all the Killzone casts that we built, that we scanned in.

AM: We scanned them and retextured them, then put them in. The idea was to save time, but...

BR: We did the opposite of saving time! We had a really cool technology and a really cool pipeline, but since it was the first time the pipeline had ever been done, it didn't save a whole lot of time.

Might it save time in the future?

BR: Oh yeah.

AM: Yeah, once pipelines for any of these things get established, most everything that we try and do as service groups here allow us to save time. If people took a sports game and tried to keyframe every move, obviously that's a huge amount of time. If we can do more to create models for people, we're going to try and leverage that to make everything look better and go quicker.

BR: There's a lot of detail that's really hard to model in. We can knock these out pretty quickly and put in a lot of that detail, then scan it in. Then it's a matter of texturing it correctly.

AM: The guy who made these has a background in miniatures for people who do dioramas and miniature war gaming and things like that. When we tapped him to do stuff for video games, it wasn't something he had ever thought about. He was really stoked.

BR: One of the things we need to do in the future is to build these modually. We need to be able to pull chunks off and scan them in individually. Scanning all of this in would be super cool, but it takes a tremendous amount of time. If we could break this apart into modual levels, scan them in, and put them back together, we'd be able to turn around much faster. As far as the exercise went, it was a successful exercise that we'll expand on when the need arises.