great meetings with the Studios in Hollywood. Put some post-demo polish on the Star Wars featurette, now it may be time to revisit Harry Potter in his most awesome game of Wizard Chess VR. Remember BattleChess? You ain’t seen nuthin yet.

Early early pre-viz:

scene recreation, v0.03

Wixards Chess, still from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. © Warner Brothers

our first task is to do the basic “blocking” on the scene. For this we use simple capsules as stand-ins for the actors. Once all the gross movement is accounted for, then we swap in the high resolution humanoid models, and slowly add in actual gestures / movements / walks / hands / head animations, lip sync, and even eye gaze, aka dristi.

character stand-ins for basic scene blocking

Harry Potter Wizards Chess, Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone © Warner Brothers

Onward.