Real-Time Cinematic Tracking of Targets in Dynamic Environments

Ludovic Burg, Christophe Lino, Marc Christie

Keywords: Virtual Cinematography, Camera Planning, Motion Predictive Control

TL;DR: An efficient real-time camera tracking technique using hardware ray casting.

Abstract: Tracking in a cinematic way a moving target inside a 3D dynamic environment remains a challenging problem. This requires to simultaneously ensure a low computational cost, a good degree of reactivity and a high cinematic quality despite sudden changes. In this paper, we draw on the idea of Motion-Predictive Control to propose an efficient real-time camera tracking technique which ensures these properties. Our approach relies on the predicted motion of a target to create and evaluate a very large number of camera motions using hardware ray casting. Our evaluation of camera motions includes a range of cinematic properties such as distance to target, visibility, collision, smoothness and jitter. Experiments are conducted to display the benefits of the approach with relation to prior work.

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