Volumetric Capture, Performance Relighting, and Sodium Vapor Matting
This talk will describe techniques from the past, present, and future for realistically compositing live-action performances into virtual environments. From the present is Eyeline Studio's cinema-quality volumetric capture process, which has been used on The Flash, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, and the Netflix anime series YuYu Hakusko to capture full-body performances three-dimensionally in high resolution, a recipient of 2024's Emerging Technology Award from the Visual Effects Society. Looking to the future is a new high-quality technique for relighting a facial performance recorded under diffuse lighting into any environmental or cinematic lighting condition. And looking to the past is a recent effort to recreate the historic Sodium Vapor Matting from the 1950's for high-quality compositing using a traveling matte cleverly photographed on a second strip of film, most famously used in Disney's Mary Poppins and Hitchcock's The Birds.
