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Tracking the Evolution of Motion Control Robotics in VFX

MRMC was recently featured in Computer Graphics World, where CEO Assaff Rawner reflects on the history of motion control and the continued evolution of Flair. Decades of industry knowledge are packed into this insightful article, offering some pleasant surprises. Did you know the first rig to ever run Flair software was a cyclops back in 1993? See the article below.

Computer Graphics World Article

“The history of motion control reflects the history of VFX itself in many ways. If you look at the hardware, it has evolved over nearly fifty years from jerry-built, individual set-ups kludged together by VFX departments to sleek, high-performance machines capable of high-speed, supremely accurate movement time and time again. And if you look at the software that controls these machines you can trace the same sort of path, one that goes from bespoke coding to the sort of elegant user interface design that allows a wide range of non-technical users to simply jump in and start working with motion control straight away. At MRMC [Mark Roberts Motion Control] we first started developing our software control system Flair in the early 1990s. Motion control had been digital for close to a decade, but the new breed of standardised, turnkey robots that we were building to satisfy growing demand, such as the ground-breaking Milo, needed equally standardized powerful software.

The first rig running Flair software, a Cyclops, landed at Cell Animation in 1993. It was genuinely revolutionary. There were other motion control vendors active in the market, but they tended to either produce the robotics or the software. MRMC uniquely did both, allowing us to iterate and develop the software at a speed according to customer requests and move motion control out of the realm of being a pure engineering solution.”

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Operator working on Flair

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