Faceware Induction and Workshop

We got offered the chance for an induction for Faceware With Jay Greier, senior technical artist at image-metrics and creator of Faceware. The program is used throughout the games, film and entertainment industries to streamline animation. Jay was at BAF to talk about how Faceware makes facial animation technologies much easier than it once was, and how it can create an enhanced gaming experience and tackle the most demanding of schedules and rigging processes.


The three biggest impacts which involve realistic facial animation in game development is time, cost and final outcome. The presentation itself was to show how image-metrics have tackled many difficulties in realistic facial animation to make it easier and better. 


Jays a trained animator and worked on GTA previously and has a lot of experience with Faceware - and explains it gets a lot easier and is fun, and allows you to have maximum artistic control

Whatever type of rig or character you're using can be driven by Faceware - it's designed to neatly plug in to whatever you're doing. Lip sync is an extremely difficult taskfor animators. It doesn't matter how good your rig or your rendering is if your timing is off, it wont look right. Faceware makes this much easier and you only need to put in 10% of the work while Faceware will literally do the other 90% of the heavy lifting for you. The workflow is much quicker where you'd take every frame and create a new pose, because which means you can get a lot more animation done in less time.

Faceware separates the face into three groups:

• Eyes - what direction they're looking and the movement of the eyelids
• Brows - everything above the eyes
• Mouth - everything below the cheeks and around the mouth

Jay says that the most important thing about facial animation is the eyes, and getting this wrong can immediately draw the gamer out of the performance.

He demonstrated Faceware autopose. This tool knows where the key poses are, so you can go straight to them and set up the poses to match the performance. Using a simple example of two poses (blink and look), with about 30 seconds of work, Jay had created 277 frames of blinks.

While it's not a particularly difficult job to hand animate eyes, all the subtle little eye darts might be missed by an animator. Faceware picks these up - another example of how the software can save you time and still result in a more realistic animation.

I attended the workshop and didn't realise it was part of Maya, which i had never used before. I'll be honest, i struggled. Didn't really have much of an idea of what i was doing and felt i was panicking a lot. Jay showed me the way a little bit but i needed a lot more time than just an hour playing around. I could clearly see the benfits and after seeing some final results i could tell it was a lot of fun.

I was very thankful to Jay at the end and would love a chance to look into Faceware more deeply so i could explore it more and find the fun within it!