At CEDEC 2020 this September, Square Enix lead animation programmer Ryuto Kazuhara and facial animation director Akira Iwasawa presented a breakdown of Final Fantasy VII Remake’s animation tech. It was live-stream only, but I managed to capture this video of the procedural facial animation system to share here.
Procedural Facial Animation
Various Animation Systems
There were also several other insights into the general Unreal 4 animation work done specifically for this game, a compilation of which you can see below. They were:
- 0:00 Procedural IK squeeze-through
- 0:34 Various look-at settings
- 1:43 Pose-matching and IK Rig
Facial Expressions
Facial Controls
Go here for a complete write-up (in Japanese) by Famitsu, google translated from the original Japanese.
And here for interviews in CGWorld.