Advanced Face Rig for Unreal Engine

Snappers is an animation studio, specializing in facial animation for video games and film. This company is best known for their Real-time Marker-less Facial Mo-Cap System and Snapper’s Facial Rig. Their phenomenal tech was used in a number of modern games, including Call of Duty Infinite Warfare, Injustice 2, Shadow of War, Mafia III. A couple of days ago the company published a YouTube video, showing some of the amazing stuff you can do with their Advanced Facial Rig for Maya and Unreal Engine.

Here are some of the features:

• FACS-based rig.
• Adaptive rig: which allows combining any number of expressions using optimized list of blendshapes.
• Real facial muscles constraints: the advanced rig logic simulates real facial muscles constraints.
• Advanced skin shader (for Maya and Unreal): holds up to 16 wrinkles maps and 16 dynamic diffuse maps with micro details and pores stretching.
• Easy to manipulate using facial controllers and/or GUI.
• Compatible with all game engines and animation packages.
• Smooth transition between all the expressions.
• Adjustment layer: freeform manipulation of multiple regions of the face to create unlimited variations of the same expression.

It is insane. And seeing this kind of tech in UE4, just goes to show how this technology can be used in the production of high-quality real-time animation.

There’s no saying if we’ll be able to see this tech as an independent software download but we sure would love to test it out.