Eschewing subtlety, a technology preview by Avid Technology’s Softimage division at July’s SIGGRAPH conference in LA offered an "in-your-face" demonstation of its new facial animation technology, Face Robot. The software allows 3D artists to achieve realistic facial animation in real time with much less effort than other products require.

Face Robot addresses one of the most difficult problems in high-resolution production today: 3D animation and rendering of human-like characters. For instance, the film Polar Express, which broke new ground by literally capturing human expression, required the animation production team to take four hours each day adhering 150 markers to actor Tom Hanks to capture the movements of his facial muscles. But Face Robot, part of Softimage’s XSI suite of digital character software tools, can achieve more realistic movements than those seen in Polar Express using only 30 markers, according to Jason Brynford-Jones, product manager for the XSI line.

You don’t have to use motion capture to get these results, however. The character of Gollum from the Lord of the Rings series took six months of development and thousands of elements just to create the keyframe animations for his facial expressions. An extensive team of animators was required to design and implement the moves, again over the course of months.

Jeff Wilson, animation supervisor at Blur Studio and a beta tester for the new software, worked closely with Avid’s Softimage division to develop it for his own use. He recently completed, in a matter of days, nearly as much animation as was used in Polar Express (employing both motion capture and keyframes) for the animated X-Men video game.

The software, based on a new computer model of facial soft tissue, mimics the full range of emotions communicated 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 way to produce either keyframe animation or motion capture animations. 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 direct, intuitive access to facial expressions, while motion-capture animators can work with fewer markers to reduce set-up and rendering time.

Furthermore, because it’s based on the 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.

The software’s target users include producers of high-end animation as well as smaller independents who might not take on facial animation projects due to the complexity and time required. Avid has not committed to a release date for a commercial version.