Tomb Raider Now Uses Weird Paint For Next-Gen Performance Capture

Here is some perspective: regular motion capture tends to use roughly 90 points of reference. In layman’s terms, there are 90 of those weird white dots stuck to the participants face. Camilla Luddington, who now plays Lara Croft just tweeted the above pic. Crystal Dynamics is now using a brand new technique for motion capture. That technique is fluorescent paint; paint which provides over 7000 points of reference.

Pretty insane. According to Camilla, the paint takes under an hour to apply and, amazingly, the paint can only be seen with black light. It’s invisible to the naked eye.

Sounds absolutely incredible. I wonder just how much it will add to capture in video games? Hopefully it will herald a more complete ability for actors to translate their performance more accurately. When games have done it correctly — Uncharted, Heavy Rain, LA Noire — it really added a new dimension to certain aspects of gaming. I’d love to see a game like Tomb Raider push those boundaries.


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