This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Wachowskis’ The Matrix Reloaded, a film known for its groundbreaking advancements in visual effects, notably photoreal digital humans. The film’s VFX team, led by **John Gaeta**, developed the Universal Capture process at VFX studio ESC Entertainment, creating astonishingly realistic digital versions of actors like Keanu Reeves and Hugo Weaving. Unlike previous methods, this process captured the nuanced details of human performance by surrounding actors with high-definition cameras to reconstruct their performance via optical flow and photogrammetry. This paved the way for future actor capture workflows and won the team a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy in 2015. The film also pushed the boundaries in motion capture, lighting, rendering, and hair and cloth simulation. These achievements significantly influenced the development of photogrammetry and 4D scanning in the film industry.
‘The Matrix Reloaded’ is 20. What it did for digital humans was HUGE