This generation’s long life-cycle has been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, so many years without new hardware has allowed us to push the limits of our current engines and learn so much about finesse and polish without the need to relearn or start from scratch.  The challenge this time around has been more about [...]

Everyone’s talking about it so it would be rude not to post that the new trailer for Rockstar’s (Sydney-based team Bondi’s) L.A. Noir dropped yesterday and the facial performances look fantastic. Using Depth Analysis’ MotionScan technology, they appear to be going all out to capture the performances of apparently over 200 characters. While the visual [...]

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick says a lot of things. While he has talked at previous investor conferences about facial animation, (curious in itself as an investor buzz-topic), he joins a growing line of non-animators claiming to have overcome the biggest challenge in CG acting. Speaking at the recent America Merrill Lynch conference: “This has been [...]

Once again, the Japanese Softimage site has posted information on another showpiece title – and they spend a heavy amount of time talking about how Softimage interfaces with Motionbuilder. This is encouraging for me as I’ve decided to dive fully into Motionbuilder for my current project after finding it to be the most rounded solution for [...]

Another small post, this time on a different approach to morph-target lip-sync. Di-O-Matic: Efficient methods for creating lip-sync blend shapes Laurent Abucassis – Founder: Di-O-Matic A considerably lower-key affair than Halon’s, this talk revolved around a demonstration on how to make phonetic mouth-shapes for lip-sync via blend-shapes (or morphing), something that, while offering more control [...]