The Facial Animation Pipeline of Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy

As part of the 2022 Animation Summit talk, Eidos-Montréal's Lead Technical Animator Simon Habib talked about the facial animation pipeline and the innovations that were implemented to ensure that the narrative of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy was realistic and could depict a wide range of believable emotions.

In his presentation, Habib covers the studio's vision and goals at the start of the project, the photogrammetry scan made for the characters, explains how the performance capture was done, and shares how the animations were brought to the final quality.

Starting the project, Eidos-Montréal knew the characters were going to be stylized, but they needed to be believable, with a lot of emotions. The team wanted to look at different technical innovations to implement in the game, and one of them was photogrammetry. The company also has its own in-house mocap stage, which was used extensively in the project. It tried to prove that it would be possible to offer both quantity and quality by having multiple tiers of facial animation quality.

Eidos-Montréal had their photogrammetry room set up with 40 DSLR cameras and 5 softbox lights. There were 13 scan sessions, and the team dotted the models' faces with around 100 facial markers and asked them to hold about 25 different expressions. 

The studio then used three types of performance capture: cinematics, banters, and e-motion. Polishing them made the animations alive and believable. 

If you want to know more about the studio's work on animation, watch the full video here. Also, don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.