1 hour ago, lz7cjc said:
Does that technology exist?
No, there is no one button trick for making a virtual person. Instead there is a list of steps that you would need to follow. None of the ways are easy and a lot of it takes practice.
1 hour ago, lz7cjc said:
However it is going to look weird clashing CGI with real footage
This will be done with a green screen set. Everything you need will cost around +/-$750, you can get everything from Amazon, the software is much more expensive. If you have time you can always learn Blender that is free but takes a lot of practice to learn.
The main idea will be to highlight the person, who should be wearing faded clothes, against the green screen. You will then remove the green screen and isolate the person. Then to correct the lighting on the person you will want to capture a cube map of the scene, that you map to the 2D cut out of the person, after you color correct the person to hide any green screen artifacts.
This is how CGI movies does it. Will take you 2-4 years to learn. Quality should be high. You could also hire a freelancer to do this but it is expensive often costing +/-$2500; but it takes them about a week to get everything going.
1 hour ago, lz7cjc said:
Ideally I would like to turn the person in the scene into an Avatar that I can then control at a later date.
Unless you are willing spend hundreds of thousands on a industrial laser scanner, you will have to go with 360 video capture to 3D model software.
Unfortunately the results of video/image to 3D is very low quality. Look around the web for software, use some trails and see what is acceptable to you. There is even websites where you can upload your image sets and turn it into a 3D model.
Then you need to retopologize the 3D model, lucky there is a good free 3D tool for this: https://github.com/wjakob/instant-meshes It should work perfectly on this kind of mesh.
The model will then be brought into the scene and animated. You will also use a cube map here to correct the lighting on the 3D model. Realistically I think this approach is going to work out $1 500 - $ 2 500, however it could be achieved in a 4-6 months. The quality will be sadly low.
Hiring a freelancer to do this will cost around +/- $6000 and will take a week or so.
The last approach is something that I doubt you would even consider, but produces fantastic quality. Just adding it here because it is really amazing:
You could hire a team of 3D modelers, 3D animation artists, actors, software developers and have them slave away for over two years, to produce some of the most innovative real time capturing software. Saying that millions was spend in the development of this software would be a understatement.
It should take around 3-6 years for software like this to reach small developers.
