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The use of drones could dramatically change the production of animated characters in the film industry, new research shows. Tobias Naegeli, a computer scientist at ETH Zuerich, pointed out a year ago that highly technical movie scenes would be easier to film using small drones. Naegeli recently demonstrated the huge potential of drones for animated films at the ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA conference in Tokyo.

According to Futurity, in current animated films, it's actually a very time-consuming job to make animated characters that look like real people. To make them look natural, you first have to film an actor's actions. , and then use this to create an animated character for the actor.

In order to reconstruct the 3D animation of the actor, at least 2 cameras had to be recorded simultaneously to cover the entire scene. This may require setting up many cameras in different locations, with only a few cameras operating at the same time.

The Naegeli team demonstrated a new system that requires only 2 general commercial drones and a laptop. The drone will automatically fly and adjust to track the actor in an appropriate position so that the actor can be filmed from different perspectives. This will save a lot of work from the camera. The system will also be able to anticipate the actor's movements in time and then calculate how the drone needs to fly in order to keep the actor in the frame.

To reduce the amount of data, infrared diode markers will be affixed to the actor's joints. A drone with 1 real light sheet will only record light from those markers, which will greatly simplify data processing. The system will only see a few points, and then decide on the actor's body position and movement direction, etc.

Naegeli admits that such a presentation system isn't enough to completely replace current film or television animation processing, but has pointed out a good direction.

A year ago, Naegeli took the 007 movie Airborne Crisis as an example of Pound's fight on the roof of a moving train. He pointed out that the scene uses multiple rapidly changing camera angles to capture the images needed for post-production, and the close-up shots are correct. The quasi-Pound face, the mid-range focus on the fight scene, and the long-range lens on the moving train. In the future, the use of drones will solve many human, material and post-production inputs.