Archive notice: This article was originally published on October 23, 2014. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
There is no question that games are becoming ever more realistic, and the big studios spare no expense or effort to achieve this. Actors are put into motion-capture suits and perform in front of scenery with props for weapons, binoculars and so on. For anyone who would like to read up on the subject: DP reported a year ago on the reopening of Ubisoft’s MoCap studio in Toronto – you can find the PDF to download at the end of the news item.
Nevertheless, facial animation and lip synchronisation in particular is and remains laborious and therefore expensive, even when Facial Performance Capture is used.
This is where FaceFX comes in. Actors speak their takes and the audio files are fed directly into FaceFX. This in turn translates the audio data into animated lip synchronisation. And of course this can then be fine-tuned by hand.
The language capabilities were expanded with the 2015 release. Russian, Portuguese and Polish are now included. FaceFX previously spoke English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Mandarin and Czech. Against this background, it is also no surprise that the software has already been used in over 300 triple-A games.
Cost: The Studio Professional version is available for 899 US dollars, a trial version is also available, and the Unlimited variant offers free updates, 24/7 support and makes the source code available to the developers so that they can integrate and adapt FaceFX in their pipeline. Here, however, the price applies per game or per project on request.
Downloads:
