Cyberpunk 2077 – Procedural Facial Animation

CD Projekt have been longtime pioneers of marrying procedurally-generated animation with hand-authoring workflows, (see their work on The Witcher 3 here), to produce exceptional quality animation across some of the largest games around. In their words:

“Cyberpunk 2077 Speech Animation Workflow: An audio performance and tagged animation transcript from Canada’s JALI Inc. is used to generate expressive high fidelity multi-lingual speech at unprecedented scale in a highly anticipated massive open world video game from CD PROJEKT RED with complex branching narrative.”

The lip-sync is some of the best I’ve seen beyond hand-keyed, which would be impossible given the number of lines in a massive RPG. Below is their Siggraph 2020 presentation on how this system works.