Digital Reality: In Your Face Animation

Eschewing subtlety, a technology preview by Avid’s Softimage division at last week’s Siggraph conference in Los Angeles created an “in your face” reaction. The new facial animation technology, called Face Robot, allows 3D artists to achieve realistic, lifelike facial animation in real time and with much less effort. When working in HD resolutions, where 3D is a memory hog and HD files carry six times the data of an SD clip, having real-time rendering capability saves time and money. It could also get you into a whole new line of animation work.

Face Robot addresses one of the most difficult things in high-resolution production today: 3D animation and rendering of human-like characters. During production on Polar Express, the animation team took four hours each day to put 150 markers on actor Tom Hanks to capture his facial expressions.

Face Robot, part of Softimage’s XSI suite of digital character software tools, can achieve more realistic movements than what people saw in Polar Express using only 30 markers, according to Jason (“Chinny”) Brynford-Jones, product manager for the XSI product line. But you don’t have to use motion capture to get these results. The large team of animators who designed and implemented moves for the character of Gollum, from the Lord of the Rings series, required six months of development and thousands of shapes/elements just to create the keyframe animations for his numerous facial expressions.

Jeff Wilson, animation supervisor at Blur Studio and a beta tester for the new software, worked closely with Softimage to develop it for his own use. He recently completed an amount of animation work rivaling that of Polar Express (employing both motion capture and keyframes) for the animated X-Men video game in a matter of days.

The software is based on a new computer model of facial “soft tissue” that mimics the full range of emotions portrayed by the human face. With many of the time-consuming processes automated and reduced to a few steps within the software, Face Robot offers an easy and intuitive way to produce either keyframe animation or motion capture animations. That’s because the soft-tissue model developed by Softimage eliminates the need to manually create dozens or even hundreds of 3D shapes for different facial expressions.

Keyframe animators get very direct, intuitive access to facial expressions, while motion-capture animators can work with fewer markers to reduce set-up and rendering time. Since it’s a division of Avid, Softimage recommends using Avid’s Mojo hardware and Media Composer Adrenaline NLE system for top performance.

Based on this soft-tissue model, the software allows artists to work on a higher level of abstraction. Instead of building shapes for each expression, the face is manipulated directly through its salient features, such as the corners of the mouth, the eyebrows or the jaw.

Avid has not yet set a launch date for the Face Robot software because the developers want to gain feedback from more users, but the company said the reaction at Siggraph was better than expected. The software’s target user is not only those who produce high-end animation for feature films and commercials, but also smaller independents who might not take on facial animation projects due to their complexity and time-intensive workflow. A fully rendered 3D digital character might be in your future.

For more information, visit http://www.softimage.com/facerobot/.