Clear Angle Studios is leading a quiet revolution in the art of 4D scanning. CEO, Dominic Ridley, tells TVBEurope about the tech behind their remarkable progressBy Matthew Corrigan
Published: February 18, 2025 Updated: February 19, 2025
Clear Angle Studios is leading a quiet revolution in the art of 4D scanning. CEO, Dominic Ridley, tells TVBEurope about the tech behind their remarkable progress
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Last August, Clear Angle Studios announced it had achieved a breakthrough in 4D performance capture. Working in collaboration with performance-driven facial animators DI4D and texture enhancement specialists, TexturingXYZ, the company showcased a video featuring a photo-realistic digital representation of an actor's performance that was virtually indistinguishable from actual footage of the human, marking a technological innovation that has far-reaching implications for the media and entertainment (M&E) industry.
Discussing both the technology behind the development and its significance to the M&E industry, Dominic Ridley, co-founder and CEO of Clear Angle Studios, begins with a brief background. The company is a global operation. Headquartered in London, Clear Angle Studios has offices in Atlanta and Vancouver, along with Budapest and other locations worldwide. This autumn, a full service studio was opened in Culver City, Los Angeles, offering a permanent scanning facility to meet burgeoning demand. We cover the film industry in terms of scanning, says Ridley. We'll scan props, vehicles, sets, environments and characters. We'll get in a helicopter and capture entire mountain ranges, but at the same time, we'll scan this pen for you, he explains, holding up the item in question.
Then, alluding to the growing convergence that has been noted in the industry, in which shifting audience trends and technological innovation has seen media companies widening their IPs, Ridley says, We're in the scanning and digitising business, traditionally we cover film production more than anything else, but we're looking to get more into gaming, as the divide narrows between photo realism in games and film.
Turning to the subject of 4D scanning, he clarifies a common misconception. It's often called 4D mocap but it isn't motion capture. It's scanning, he says, gently correcting the misnomer. Clear Angle Studios, first and foremost, is in the business of data capture. Explaining further, he adds, 4D scanning is essentially motion scanning. When you take a video and turn it into per-frame 3D scans, so you're getting animation at the same time from all angles, that's essentially what 4D scanning is: taking a static scan and making it an animated scan.
In simple terms, the fourth D might refer to the movement aspect of the data, the animation itself.
It's the movement, yeah, but as soon as you get into movement you end up with 24 times or 30 times, or 48 times as much data as you would from a 3D scan, says Ridley, identifying what has until now been a significant barrier to the process the immense requirement for computing power. Traditionally, 4D scans were relatively low res, to try and make up for the fact that there was so much more data. It's very processor heavy, because you've got to process 24 3D frames per second over a period of however many seconds or minutes that you've got. Usually, you'd have gone lower res. Instead of doing one high res scan, you'd do lots of smaller low res scans and that would drive your animation. Essentially, you'd drive the high res texture from the neutral pose across all the other poses.
Referring to the August presentation, Ridley continues, [The video that] we presented in collaboration with DI4D and TexturingXYZ does contain a certain portion of it. It's how we enable the high res to happen for every single frame. That's how it's unique, quite different. It was a lot of work a lot but it gave us a stepping stone into the next possible, the next high res way of capturing and displaying data.
Division of labour Work on the project was divided between the three specialists, with each company providing its own expertise. Firstly, the subject, Clear Angle Studios' finance director, Michael Pedersen, was scanned into the system. We recorded him performing FACS shapes with our synchronised video camera system so that we could capture all the facial expression transitions from neutral to each of the FACS shapes at 24 frames per second, says Ridley. We processed that data to produce a per-frame sequence of OBJ files, which we delivered to DI4D. At this stage the OBJ data has a different random mesh topology per frame. DI4D wrapped the mesh topology from the base mesh accurately onto one frame of the OBJ sequence data. They then used their state-of-the-art mesh tracking solution to track this mesh topology accurately onto every other frame in the sequence. The result is a 4D sequence comprising a highly consistent mesh topology, which deforms as the face transitions from neutral to each of the FACS shapes. The reason that's key is because at the end of the process, every frame of data has an identical UV layout.
The data was then returned to Clear Angle Studios, where it was textured and sent on to TexturingXYZ, the third project partner. This final stage entailed analysis of the texture, normal maps and displacement maps, using TexturingXYZ's bespoke solutions, Hyperskin 2.0 and HyperlookX, which enabled the data to be enhanced. They have a really cool platform, says Ridley. It's incredible tech and gives the data that little bit of extra cherry on top.
Capturing the data requires the use of Dorothy, Clear Angle Studios' proprietary system, which has developed through seve
