Eyetronics scans all characters for Capcom's Steel Battallion: Heavy Armor

Last year, Capcom called us up at 3D Eyetronics Inc and asked if we could scan a large number of people for their -at the time- top-secret! next generation action game. As we've done this many times for games such as MLB: The Show and Rockstar's GTA IV, we agreed right away. 

We contacted several modeling agencies and looked through headshots of hundreds of people. It was needed that we scanned about 300 of them, so that our client, Capcom in this case, could later decide which ones they wanted. And so, when we found all 300 of them, we invited them over to our studio, and for about a week Eyetronics looked like a car manufacturer, with people showing up, signing in, getting prepped, wig-capped, seated, instructed, scanned, and booted back out the door.  

Now, for those who don't know about Eyetronics, let me quickly explain how it works. Our scanning technology is a structured light based system. A projector shoots an array of patterns at the subject, and a high speed camera captures the result. A second SLR camera, hooked up to some nice strobe lights, captures a (at the moment) 15 megapixel color photograph. Our proprietary software then takes all these images, and generates fairly quickly a high resolution 3D polygonal mesh, and uses the color photo as a texture image. All this is done automatically and requires little or no human effort (except the part where I click the 'scan' button).  

So now we needed for Capcom to make their final decision. We had sent them all the high resolution shots (about 2400 of them, including all angles and profile-shots) for them to choose from.  In the end, we had about a 100 to work on. 

Their artists had provided us with template geometry which would be morphed onto our scan data. The cool thing for them was that this way, our models could be inserted DIRECTLY into their game engine, as the point order was kept intact. 

Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor was a really cool project to work on. It certainly kept us busy for several weeks. And as you can read on the Eyetronics website, they were very happy with our work, and would love to use us for their next project!