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Cory Strassburger, co-founder of Kite & Lightning (a VR creative studio located in LA) is widely known for his work on Bebylon: a CG baby animated in real-time using off the shelf technologies such as an iPhone, a Xsens mocap suit and the Unreal Engine. This project was met with critical acclaim at SIGGRAPH 2018. If you missed it at the time, here is the demo:
Cory Strassburger is back with Xanadu, a Youtube vlog concept he’s been working on for the last few months. The videos star two hipster Alien characters.
The quality level is quite impressive, and the workflow used on Bebylon has been tweaked and improved. For example, Cory Strassburger added Manus gloves for finger tracking, Metahuman avatars. The Unreal Engine is still the heart of the show and is used for almost everything (performance capture, lighting, VFX, rendering…). He also relies on assets from online marketplaces. Adobe Premiere was used for the editing.
Here is the result, with a short presentation of the concept followed by the first three episodes:
