Face Robot co-creator and USC animation teacher Thomas Kang notes that "[Face Robot] takes care of the technology of facial rigging, so [the student] can focus on the art."

Softimage began developing Face Robot due to requests from some of its clients, especially in the game industry, and in response to industry trends. "People in the industry had been doing a more sophisticated, realistic kind of animation," Kang says. "The expectations for the baseline quality were going up pretty dramatically." Citing characters such as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as King Kong and Davy Jones, as examples, he adds, "On the film side it was happening, but also on the game side. Especially in cinematics, and even in-game now, with the next-generation consoles."

"The process of getting a good performance out of the face of a character was a very technical process," Stevens adds. "The face drives the performance, but that was one of the areas that had gotten the least attention."

Meanwhile, one of the company's clients from the game sector, Blur Studio, was looking for new tools to keep up with clients' facial animation demands and came to Softimage Special Projects for help. "They do lots of high-quality animation in an insanely short amount of time," Kang reports, noting that existing tools "weren't scaling fast enough."

While the product started as a solution for a client, the company saw broader possibilities. After a long development process -- during which Blur helped test the product, even using beta versions in production -- Softimage introduced Face Robot to the industry at large last June.

For character generation, the school chose evolver which allows the class to create six mo-cap-ready character skeletons, with textures and skinning, without knowing how to build 3D characters. evolver images © Darwin Dimensions.

Character Generation
For the performance-capture class, USC needed a similarly simple solution for character generation. "There was no time to rig characters, and it's not a character-rigging class," Furie explains. The school chose Darwin Dimensions' evolver, which allowed the class to create six mocap-ready character skeletons, with textures and skinning, without knowing how to build 3D characters.

"It's an amazing piece of software," Furie says. "Like Face Robot, it's just jaw-dropping." evolver also worked well with Face Robot, which was important in terms of the smooth flow of the class. In fact, the process of taking the evolver mesh and making it ready for animation in Face Robot took just 15 minutes.

evolver builds characters from a virtual gene pool with interchangeable 3D facial features and body types that can be mixed and matched, tweaked and morphed while retaining the integrity of character rigging and other attributes, according to the company. evolver creator Michel Fleury, managing director of Darwin Dimensions and associate professor at the University of Québec at Montréal, notes that as characters are generated, the set-up is recalculated to the new morphology, so the skeleton, blendshapes, textures and skin weights are well-balanced for general-purpose movement. A full-feature character can be generated in about four minutes.

evolver builds characters from a virtual gene pool with interchangeable 3D facial features and body types that can be mixed and matched, tweaked and morphed while retaining the integrity of character rigging and other attributes.

"So if a course is oriented toward animation and you do not want to lose time making the character fit your needs," Fleury explains, "then you have a very fast way of creating your own personalized high-end character (your genetic code), without spending weeks of fine tweaking to prepare it for animation. The dirty work has been done automatically with our generator on our server. Eric wanted professional-quality, ready-to-animate characters, so it was a natural fit for him to use evolver."

The entire pipeline for the performance-capture class was designed to simplify the process and allow the students to focus on creating the best performances possible, Furie says. In addition to Face Robot and evolver, the class used the school's Vicon motion-capture system with Vicon IQ for control and clean-up. A Vicon plug-in was used to put the skeleton into Motion Builder for body animation. After facial animation was done in Face Robot, the facial and body data was put back into Motion Builder without using Maya or XSI, a fairly complicated step that the Softimage Special Projects team worked out. Avid Media Composer was used for editing.