Oscar Winner Brings Monsters to Life with His Simulation Software

Another cool self-developed tool is the Mantis Motion Controller.

https://www.bfg-motion.com/

It's been developed by a cinematographer who specialized in stop-motion animation and other special effects, Melbourne-based Gerald Thompson [0]. In true amateur spirit, the above website is probably 90% stock content that he never bothered to remove (e.g., the "team" is just the generic placeholder garbage that came with the template). That might turn you off, but the product is so niche that I suppose there is no point in making a professional website for a wider audience.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2756662/

While technically very impressive you would hope this effort would be reflected in a higher quality of resulting movie, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

It's interesting that even their details mention essentially using it as a ML training set data generator for later:

"By analysing training sets that demonstrate how a 3D character should look as it moves, Ziva RealTime learns to reconstruct the shape of that character at realtime speeds.

Character effects that traditionally require seconds or even minutes per frame are reproduced in milliseconds. This unlocks the potential to deploy full-fidelity character assets into Virtual Production, Virtual Reality, or game environments and directly interact with them."