Clear Angle Studios Integrates DI4D Technology

Clear Angle Studios (CAS) has folded DI4D's markerless 4D facial capture technology into its global workflow and introduced TopoTrack, a pipeline extension aimed at moving from raw scans to character-ready assets while reducing production bottlenecks.

CAS says the toughest stages in facial work begin after capture, with the need to re-topologise and stabilise FACS scans and to map head-mounted camera (HMC) data accurately onto high-resolution geometry. By integrating DI4D's tools and expertise, TopoTrack is designed to maintain fidelity from the moment of capture through to asset delivery, providing consistent world space, precise eye and jaw tracking, and a direct bridge to HMC and 4D motion-control workflows.

The integration brings more than 20 years of DI4D research to CAS's established capture network. Since 2003, DI4D has helped pioneer digital-double performance capture on projects including Blade Runner 2049, Love, Death & Robots and the Call of Duty franchise. Its proprietary optical-flow tracking, which stabilises dense facial data at sub-pixel precision, is now operating within CAS. DI4D co-founder Dr Colin Urquhart has joined CAS as Strategic Advisor overseeing product research and deployment.

TopoTrack's value proposition combines hardware accuracy with software stability. CAS notes that high-quality processing depends on pristine inputs, anchored by its capture platforms: the Dorothy head rig (54 Canon SLRs, 22 Sony A7R3s and 13 machine-vision cameras for high-resolution, texture-rich FACS sessions), the X-Series full-body rigs (204 cameras capturing consistent datasets in about 1.2 seconds), and high-density illumination and geometry capture to minimise session-to-session variance.

The workflow is built to respect a studio's preferred topology. CAS supplies a neutral scan; partner teams then wrap it with their base mesh—either a bespoke in-house layout or a standard such as MetaHuman—so they control UVs and the internal setup for eyes and teeth. Once that re-topologised neutral is returned, DI4D algorithms propagate the chosen topology across all requested FACS shapes. Multi-view, sub-pixel tracking stabilises the geometry for isolated deformations, mathematically locking the mesh to the performance and validating accuracy even on extreme expressions.

The resulting assets feature highly stable UVs across shapes, enabling perfectly aligned 8K object-space normal maps, RGB-packed displacement maps and specular maps that match geometry frame-for-frame. CAS positions TopoTrack as a means to preserve performance detail and give game and VFX teams a cleaner, more efficient starting point for character work by handling stabilisation at the processing stage.

CAS describes TopoTrack as the first step in a broader alignment of capture and processing under one R&D strategy. With DI4D's research embedded in the pipeline, the company plans further updates to meet evolving film and games production needs.

www.clearanglestudios.co.uk/