Dynamixyz might not be a household name in games middleware quite yet, but it’s bringing bold ideas about facial animatio from other disciplines, including a potential replacement for mo-cap. Will Freeman asks CEO Gaspard Breton to elaborate
Markerless facial capture is supported by Dynamixyz’s Performer tool, which is optimised for interfacing with existing pipelines
Before we talk about individual products and services, could you give me a brief overview of what Dynamixyz provides? Is there a general direction that defines the kind of tools you create? Basically, our business is high quality performance-based facial animation. Despite everything we hear about how
hard it is to create nice and realistic-looking facial animation, previous productions have shown that it was possible. That, however, usually requires dedicating a
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considerable amount of resource and expertise to it. As a general direction, our goal is to
develop tools that enable studios to produce high-end facial animation in a less complex and less expensive way. With an increasing demand in quality and
quantity of facial animation data, our tools offer a complete solution that opens the technology up to a much wider range of budgets and studios, even those with no previous experience of such tools.
What distinguishes your tools from those made by other facial animation outfits? Completeness is probably one of the
importance differences. Indeed, the term facial animation
encompasses a chain of different processes, the most important ones being performance capture, facial features tracking, and motion transfer to a virtual character. Each of those processes has its challenges, and solving only one of them would lead to a partial solution, unlikely to help non-experts