Founded in 2008 by James (Jamie) Busby and Chris Rawlinson in Sheffield, Ten24 is a trailblazer in 3D scanning and asset creation for games, films and television. With a core team of five and a network of freelancers, Ten24 delivers high-end digital assets to a prestigious list of clients featuring Silicon Valley heavyweights, Microsoft, Apple and Activision, to name but a few. As the company embarks on a groundbreaking project to create an ethical data set of 10,000 3D scanned faces, we caught up with Jamie and Ben Carlin, Creative Producer at Ten24, to find out more about this pioneering Sheffield company.

At its inception in 2008 Ten24 delivered 3D scanning of people, faces and bodies. This capability was something Jamie had been exploring for a while, convinced that the time consuming and costly methods of digital character creation could be improved through 3D scanning, inspired by the tech behind Google Earth.

Bringing on board Chris Rawlinson, former lead character artist at Sumo Digital, the duo combined innovation and artistic flair to make a significant breakthrough in the industry.

“There was a lot of research in this area, so it’s not like we invented it, but we were able to push it along significantly,” says Jamie. He explains: “Production time for a character used to be around two months, when you were having to sculpt the likeness of a famous actor from scratch, for example. We got this production time down to half a day, pretty much overnight.”

The process also brought down costs from around £40,000 to £4,000 for a single character. These significant benefits, on top of Jamie and Chris’s artistic talent, which they applied to make custom modifications of scans – such as zombie versions – made the small company a hugely attractive prospect, as word spread amongst the global entertainment industries.

Heavyweight clients

Over the past decade and a half, Ten24 has contributed to nearly every major game featuring human characters. Their impressive client roster includes tech giants like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Sega and Activision.

They have worked on high-profile projects such as Netflix’s “Love, Death & Robots,” scanning numerous celebrities for the show, and legendary actors Michael Caine, Colin Firth, Taron Egerton and Sofia Boutella were scanned by Ten24 for Kingsman: The Secret Service.

The company holds a significant stake in Steel City Interactive after coming on board with the successful e-Sports game “Undisputed”. The boxing game features many of the world’s boxing superstars, with Jamie noting, “We’ve scanned every boxer in the world pretty much, here in Sheffield in our little office.”

Diversifying 

The 3D Scan Store, Ten24’s online platform, offers a vast array of scanned assets for sale. This store provides high-quality, ready-to-use digital scans that cater to various creative and commercial needs.

“We realised that we could do less of the demanding bespoke projects that involved travel and onsite scans. We scan stuff here, and put it online for sale,” says Jamie.

The assets in the 3D Scan Store are informed by Ten24’s constant research and development. He adds, “We just look for trends to see what people want, and then we’ll go and make that. All the big games companies and filmmakers, as well as the indie filmmakers, are buying scans from there.”

The Sapiens project

Ten24’s latest venture, the Sapiens project, is funded by an Innovate UK Smart Grant and aims to create an ethical and GDPR-compliant dataset of 10,000 face scans.

The team predicts many uses for the data set, including AI training, game character creation and human-machine interfaces. Significantly, they want to create a diverse and inclusive dataset that will enhance representation in games.

“Diversity is something that’s really missing in the games industry,” says Jamie. “There’s a lot of unconscious bias because it’s primarily an industry run by white men, so the output in games is that everyone’s just, you know, a white, muscly man, or maybe a skinny white girl.” 

This goal will influence how the team onboards participants for the project, as Ben explains:

“When we start to do the scanning in Sheffield I’m sure we’ll find that we have higher numbers in some demographics than others. So it may be that we do targeted advertising campaigns to raise awareness of the project amongst certain ethnic groups, or even take this to other parts of the UK to increase representation.” 

Ten24 is starting trials for Sapiens late this summer in Sheffield. Participants are paid for a 15-minute scan session, contributing to a potentially groundbreaking data set that could underpin advancements in human-machine interfaces for the next 20 to 30 years. Potential applications include self-driving cars, robotics and medical technology. 

Additionally, the project will set an ethical standard for AI training data collection, prompting what Jamie hopes will be a step change in how big tech companies are collecting data and training it. He says,

“The way that we’re going about this means we have a data protection officer, everything is GDPR compliant and we’re just being transparent about where the data is going and how it’s being used. So we’re hoping that this promotes a better approach to training AI.”

Ben adds, “Hopefully, this will promote a really healthy conversation around AI and the potential uses for it. There’s going to be lots of people who just don’t want to be scanned and be in a data set. And that’s absolutely fine. But there’s going to be lots of people that might.

“So the idea is that we get it down to under 15 minutes per person when they come in, they see the model release and they’re informed. It’s a decision that they have to make themselves, as opposed to us trying to sell it to them. That’s the difference, they choose whether they want to do it.”

For more information about the Sapiens project or to book a scan session, visit sapiens-booking.com. For inquiries, contact sapiens@ten24.info. You can stay up to date with Ten24 on X and check out some of their work on the website: ten24.info.