How 3D Scanning Brought ‘BioShock Infinite’ to Life
When Irrational Games needed to create a distinctive look to promote the female lead in the video game BioShock Infinite, it looked to 3D scanning rather than traditional modeling software. The game’s leading lady, Elizabeth Comstock, is one of the most original and engaging digital characters in years, and her realistic appearance in a commercial for the game revealed how effectively the technology can convey facial features and emotions. Elizabeth’s in-game design came from a traditional combination of motion-capture for her body and 3D modeling for her face, but Irrational needed a face for Elizabeth in the promotional materials — billboards, print and online ads and even TV spots. As the game neared its release in March, Irrational knew that Elizabeth would have to grab the audience’s attention right away, and set about crafting a TV commercial for the game. Elizabeth’s expressive face and realistic features come by way of an Artec 3D scanner: a professional-grade product made by a startup company in Moscow. “Our scanners are a little different,” Anna Zevelyov, Artec 3D Scanning’s director of business development, told TechNewsDaily. “Actually, they’re a lot different!” Whereas most professional-grade 3D scanners rest on a tripod and require a person to move them around an object very slowly, Artec’s scanner is handheld and operates like a video camera. “You take it in your hand, you walk around the object, and you capture it at 16 [frames per second],” Zevelyov said. “It automatically aligns all the strains together to create a single object in 3D.” The Artec scanners’ size and rapidity make them a natural fit for capturing human subjects, Zevelyov said. “Humans can’t stand still very long,” she added. Irrational Games sought out Anna Moleva, a popular Russian cosplayer — someone who dresses up as characters from pop culture for conventions or photo shoots — to represent Elizabeth in the commercial. As a Russian scanning company, Artec was a natural fit. “This beautiful young Russian woman came by and she was posing,” Zevelyov explained. “We scanned her here and sent the scans to Los Angeles. They did all the postproduction on it; they made her come to life.” “We made her do a bunch of faces,” Zevelyov said. “Here she is angry, here she is sad, here she is laughing, here she is frowning … Once [artists] get these scans, they don’t have to imagine what she might look like, because they’ve never seen her.” Zevelyov estimates the whole scanning session took, at most, 20 minutes — a far cry from the eight-plus hours it can often take designers to create a face from scratch. Without 3D scanning, making a face for a video game character can be an arduous process, to say nothing of animating it or connecting it to a moveable body. “It takes [designers] about four hours to draw a face, and another four hours to draw the texture and color of the face, and the shape,” Zevelyov said. “Let’s say they want to digitize Brad Pitt,” she […]