Anzovin Studio, creator of The Setup Machine for Maya, has announced the release of a new product, The Face Machine for Maya, which makes rigging faces fast and easy.
Like TSM, The Face Machine (TFM) automatically installs a high-level setup and does intelligent point weighting. TFM supports both box controls and direct controls that allow the animator to simply grab the face and deform it into exactly the desired expression.
Since it's based on direct deformation, rather than a set of pre-defined blend shapes, TFM rigs can produce any facial expression imaginable. Anzovin Studio also offers a free plug-in, Anzovin Rig Nodes, which allows rigs generated by TFM to be used on any Maya license.
"Rigging faces is difficult," said Anzovin Studio president Raf Anzovin, "and animators with no access to dedicated rigging specialists are often hampered by the time-consuming process of creating a rig suitable for their needs, or forced to work with one that doesn't make it easy to achieve the facial expressions they want. The Face Machine not only makes rigging a face quick and easy, it also provides animators with intuitive, direct controls to ensure that they can achieve a high level of expressivity."
Highlights of The Face Machine For Maya include:
--Fast Rigging: Like TSM, TFM uses a simple "face widget" to rig characters. All an animator needs to do is to fit it to the mesh and hit rig.
--Intelligent weighting: TFM's intelligent weighting technology is capable of automatically recognizing the difference between an upper lip and a lower lip on most faces, cutting down manual weight cleanup time to a fraction of what is needed for other influence-based face rigs.
--Integrated interface: A special schematic window, embedded in each TFM character, allows you to select facial controls with unparalleled ease.
--Direct control: With TFM, animators can grab a character's face controls and immediately start posing. TFM eliminates clumsy blend shape sliders.
--Box controls: With its simple box control creation interface, TFM makes multidimensional sliders a snap to create.
--Pose saving and recall: Any face could use a library of facial poses. TFM allows you to easily save a facial pose library, either locally for your own use or on a server for use by a team of animators, complete with thumbnails for easy identification.
For in-depth information on the features of The Face Machine, including an online manual, sample rig, and feature demonstration movies, visit www.thefacemachine.com/
The Face Machine for Windows or MacOSX can be purchased at www.anzovinstore.com. Each license costs $199. The Face Machine and The Setup Machine can also be purchased as a bundle for $249. Student discounts will soon be available. A Linux release is scheduled for the near future.
