Based in Santa Monica, CA, our team of facial animation experts leverage our FACEWARE software to achieve creative goals faster. We take pride in being a technology company which provides an animation director solely to establish and maintain your creative vision.
To be an effective outsource solution, not only does Image Metrics leverage a powerful suite of software tools, we also empower your animation supervisors to creatively establish expectations as early in animation as possible. Through the use of actor-CG character studies, expression sheets, pose libraries, and early animation tests, we can ensure your schedule and creative desire will be met before the bulk of work is done. This is how Image Metrics has excelled as an outsource resource on such titles as Splice, Red Dead Redemption, Halo: Reach, Assassin's Creed II: Brotherhood, and Ultramarines: A Warhammer 40,000 Movie.
Image Metrics provides four main professional animation service levels:
The HEADSTART service level will establish solid foundations of animation timing and blocking that is in sync with your actors' video performance—straight out of our facial animation software, FACEWARE, with little or no tweaks done to your curves by our team. Headstart closely matches the video performance 1:1, getting your team the foundation for a great piece of facial animation. It does not include head or tongue animation. We often like your team to define the poses which make up your character prior to our team starting animation—we do this to be an effective outsource solution and to creatively have your team establish your characters before we begin animation.
The PRO service level allows your team to art direct two additional creative iterations and make creative fixes on the animation to your own desire (like if your actor missed a beat, eyelines needing to be corrected, etc). The Pro service level is only for in-game or runtime environments which often limit functionality and fidelity of 3D character rigs. This service level is meant to take animation 100% to the finish line, even if that means straying away from the original video performance. Pro level results will include tongue movement and head movement where needed. Head movement animation may be provided by customer with body motion in the scene, including motion-captured data. Accurate head movement data will allow for more precise accuracy when adjusting sight-lines on overall performance between characters.
The PREMIERE service level also allows your team to art direct three additional creative iterations beyond the Headstart level and make creative fixes on the animation. However, the premiere service level often is for pre-rendered environments which have increased quality and more intricate/ complex character rigs.
The FACEPRO service level is an audio- and text-based service level. Clients will deliver clean audio files (one actor speaking at a time), as well as a script for each line of dialogue. Each character rig will need to be setup and configured for FacePro utilizing the FaceFX™ animation toolset. Our team will establish a character mapping and phoneme library for FaceFX™ based off the same poses we will leverage in our FACEWARE software. Animation is then batch-processed through FaceFX™ and a quick pass of eye and brow animation is added to improve results. Facepro offers only one iteration, but is optimal for large quantities of in-game animation.
In a world where scripts are never locked until the 11th hour, and animation teams are shrinking, allow our team of experts to achieve mind-blowing throughput and ensure quality for your project.
