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Q&A With Curvin Huber

Meet White Snake Projects’ Director of Innovation Curvin Huber. In addition to his position as Professor of Interactive Media at Becker College, Curvin lends his design and technological expertise to many of White Snake Projects’ productions. Most recently, Curvin helped to create groundbreaking new motion capture technology for Alice in the Pandmic. Read more about Curvin’s role in Alice below!

 

Was there a particular game or show you played or saw that inspired you to pursue this line of work?

 

No particular game or show. I am actually not much of a gamer. Big VFX films were my inspiration to get into the 3D animation industry.

 

How have you been collaborating with the director and librettist to plan and execute on the animation?

 

We have been using Zoom to collaborate and review animation work. We listen to the libretto’s scratch track provided by the Composer, then discuss what we would like to see happen as the music progresses. We do not use a traditional visual storyboarding approach to our animation process.

 

What is the technology you’re using for live facial motion capture?

 

We initially took an off-the-shelf approach using Reallusion iClone. However, when we knew we were going fully online for the production, iClone was too limited. We are now developing our own facial mocap system from scratch that will allow facial data coming from the singers to be sent over the internet for processing in the CGI world. 

 

What makes Alice different from previous shows White Snake Projects have done using this sort of technology, like PermaDeath?

 

The main difference is the facial motion capture solution. Again, we needed a solution that could send facial tracking data over the internet with minimal lag then feed that data into Unreal Engine to drive the facial performance of the avatars.