Cubic Motion [1] announced a new program for publishers and studios to access large volume discounts for the highest quality facial animation, by combining individual developer projects into joint pricing arrangements.
Cubic’s uniquely scalable animation processes greatly increases production efficiency as animation volumes rise but, until now, discounts have only been available on a project-by-project basis. The new program makes discounts of up to 40% available to many more studios, where studios work with the same publisher or where studios are jointly owned.
Simon Elms, COO of Cubic Motion explained: “We believe our processes already represent by far the world’s most efficient way for developers to create high-quality facial animation. However, we’re committed to reducing the cost to studios still further – our goal is to see that all games are populated with facial animation which does justice to the rest of the product, whatever the volume. Too often, time and cost constraints limit either the quality, or the volume, of good facial animation in a game. As more and more studios reduce their production risk and increase the visual quality of their product by choosing our solution, we have greater opportunity to help those working under a common publisher or parent by further lowering cost and creating even tighter control over production schedules. For example, with certain pipeline choices, under this program a studio could pay just $10 per second for very complex AAA facial animation – and that’s to final production standard, not some ‘rough pass’ or ‘blocking out’ that still requires a ton of internal effort - and even less than that for in-game, background or high volume facial animation.”
Any studio or publisher wishing to access the program can do so by contacting Cubic Motion: www.cubicmotion.com [1]. Cubic operates a free test program where sample results are delivered on client assets so that studios can directly compare productivity gains with Cubic Motion against other products and services.
Source: Cubic Motion
Links:
[1] http://www.cubicmotion.com