I just came across the following piece of software from FaceFX. What initially caught my attention was the price for the plugin ($199) which is available for Autodesk 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage and Motionbuilder.
After visiting the site I found out that in addition to the company offering plugins for sale, they also have a standalone product called FaceFX Studio Professional 2010 and FaceFX Unlimited 2010.
According to the site “FaceFX is OC3 Entertainment’s cutting edge solution for creating realistic facial animation from audio files.”
Check also the video “FaceFX 2010 – Analyzing Audio in FaceFX Studio”
Has anybody used this yet?
Below is their press release for those of you that are interested.
Facial Animation Software Gets Affordable – FaceFX Plugins Launched for $199
Research Triangle Park, NC – May 26th 2010 – The facial animation solution powering over 150 triple-A game titles is now being sold as an affordable line of plugins for several popular Autodesk animation packages. For $199, the same technology driving blockbuster video game characters is available to animators on a shoestring budget. To make the deal even sweeter, a single FaceFX plugin license can be shared across team members on different computers using a flexible and powerful licensing system.
FaceFX technology has been powering intense story lines in games for years, but licensing required expensive per-title license agreements which excluded indie game developers, simulation developers, and animators from other industries. Now the technology is available for purchase from www.facefx.com and through resellers including Turbosquid in New Orleans (www.turbosquid.com), and Born Digital in Japan (www.borndigital.co.jp).
FaceFX generates high quality animations from audio files, using a recorded sound file and optional text transcription to synthesize an accurate animation including lip-synchronization and facial expressions. The FaceFX plugins generate morph target or bones-based animations from inside of 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage and MotionBuilder.
For More Information Contact:
Doug Perkowski, OC3 Entertainment, Inc.
info@oc3ent.com
(919) 727-9624
Additional Press Info
About FaceFX
FaceFX (www.facefx.com) is an advanced facial animation solution unique in its ability to liberate artists from the complexities of creating realistic dialogue and emotive characters. FaceFX can be used to animate characters by hand or generate lip-synchronization and speech gesture data automatically from pre-recorded audio. FaceFX can be integrated with any game engine or facial animation pipeline. For a list of games using FaceFX, see www.facefx.com/game-titles
FaceFX is a registered trademark of OC3 Entertainment. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
