On a Par with Hollywood! My Work on Motion Capture for "A Record of Mortal’s Cultivation to Immortal

Applications: Motion Capture, CG Animation, Japanese Anime Series, Unreal Engine (UE), Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC).

The high-quality production "A Record of Mortal's Cultivation to Immortality", which is hailed as an "example of the world's contemporary animation standards" in the industry, was released with great popularity. The motion capture technology in it was provided by Shanghai Qingtong Technology Co., Ltd. The name "Qingtong " has long been well-known in the industry. In 2015, Qingtong was established and released its independently developed motion capture system in the same year. It has already completed the angel round and Series A financing.

Qingtong has always been focusing on motion capture. The innovative motion capture system jointly developed with Original Force is benchmarked against the internationally renowned manufacturer "Profile Studios", which is a service provider that offers motion capture technology for Hollywood blockbusters such as "Avatar" and "The Avengers". This indicates that China's motion capture technology has been able to rival the works of Hollywood.

The number of views is rushing towards 100 million! "Animation + an incredibly cool and exciting feeling of following the drama! It has achieved it!"

At 8:00 p.m. on July 25th, the Chinese all-live-action CG serial drama "A Record of Mortal's Cultivation to Immortality", produced by Bilibili, Cat Film, Wanwei Cat Animation, and Original Force, premiered on Bilibili! Immediately after its premiere, the rating soared to 9.6 points. As of the date of this article's release, the rating on Bilibili is still as high as 9.2 points, with the number of followers exceeding 65 million person-times. And it reached the top of the Bilibili domestic original animation ranking just one day after its broadcast!

The animation of "A Record of Mortal's Cultivation to Immortality" gives people the exciting pleasure of following the drama that makes them exclaim "satisfying". The story is adapted from the eponymous immortal cultivation novel "A Record of Mortal's Cultivation to Immortality", which is a leading work in Chinese immortal cultivation novels.

The animation of "A Record of Mortal's Cultivation to Immortality" truly reproduces the scenes, action performances and character expressions in the original work. The innovative live-action animation production technology is used throughout the whole process. Therefore, some media also praise it as a work of "a new type of Chinese anime animation".

Engine shooting and motion capture technology are becoming highlights in the industry.

The reason why the animation of "A Record of Mortal's Cultivation to Immortality" can reach such a high level is inseparable from the engine shooting and motion capture technologies used by the production team.

The characters in the animation need to embody the charm elements in the original work, such as the personalities, characteristics, and emotions, so that the audience can be immersed in it. Especially for the main characters, only with rich enough humanity and emotions can they arouse the resonance of the audience. The presentation effect by real actors is realistic, but it would cost an astonishing amount to reproduce all the real people and real scenes.

The "motion capture" technology has already matured. All the actor needs to do is to put on the black motion capture suit with marked points to absorb light. The cameras will record the image information of all the reflective points marked in the venue at a speed of 180FPS. Through algorithms, the coordinate positions of the marked points in the three-dimensional space are restored in real time, thus obtaining the limb data of the corresponding actor's performance. Then, these data are redirected to the corresponding bones of the virtual character to drive the limb movements of the digital character of the corresponding actor, and the motion capture is completed.

Therefore, considering various factors, it is a wise choice to have real actors perform, use motion capture technology to capture real-time data, and apply animation engines to present unlimited scenes.

The animation of "A Record of Mortal's Cultivation to Immortality" has significantly improved the production efficiency by applying the Unreal Engine, a real-time rendering engine, in combination with Qingtong motion capture shooting. A complete set of virtual shooting engine equipment only needs to include cameras, Mocap workstations, UE workstations, and related Pipeline tool workstations, etc., to produce high-quality animations.

Challenges and Breakthroughs in Quality and Time

In terms of animation quality and visual impression, compared with typical 3D animations, the performance, rendering, and lighting in the animation of "A Record of Mortal's Cultivation to Immortality" are closer to real human actions. Motion capture and the Unreal Engine can quickly produce a large number of high-quality animations, having an edge over traditional animations. In addition, the design of actions and martial arts in the animation is also a very prominent aspect of the whole film.

Relying on Qingtong real-person motion capture technology and the real-time UE (Unreal Engine), the animation of "A Record of Mortal's Cultivation to Immortality" presents numerous highly difficult action designs and more diverse and changeable shooting angles, enabling its magnificent and grand martial arts actions to be shown to the fullest extent in terms of visual perception!

The company is headquartered in Shanghai. Currently, its customers are spread all over mainland China and Taiwan, China, and its products are also exported to many countries such as Japan and South Korea. The company adheres to independent research and development and has many successful application cases in the optical motion capture industry. Qingtong is dedicated to the exploration of optical motion capture. With excellent product quality and multi-dimensional innovation, it is continuously growing rapidly, hoping to bring a wonderful human-machine delivery experience to every customer and make the virtual and the real closer and more harmonious.

Currently, Shanghai Qingtong Technology Co., Ltd. has established long-term cooperation and interaction with Internet-listed companies such as Huawei, Tencent, and Lianluo Interactive. Its products have penetrated into theme park sectors such as Joy Valley, Sanya Trust, and SoReal. In the film and television part, it has already provided services for well-known enterprises and institutions such as Original Force Animation, 2:10 Animation, Mikros Image, Tian Gong Yi Cai, Hangzhou Xuanji, Wulifang, Vancouver Film School, Tsinghua University, and Peking University.