Driven by performance. Powered by artists.
Faceware Retargeter™ utilizes the facial tracking data created in Analyzer and creates high-quality facial animation very quickly. By plugging into Autodesk Maya, 3DS Max, Motionbuilder, and Softimage, Retargeter combines the video performance of an actor and the artistic hand of an animator to set keyframes on your facial rig.
In almost no time at all you can create a high-quality pass of animation on your rig. Whether you are looking to work quickly and extract only the major motions and timing of the actor, or you’d like to spend a little more time and pull out all of the subtle detail in the face, Retargeter can get you what you need.
With our workflow you’re spending less time blocking out animation and more time polishing so you can focus on realistic facial movements. Spend your time where it counts and let Retargeter do the heavy lifting for you. You’re not tied down to any special facial rig setups or a specific application. Our face animation software can be used on any facial rig and in four different software packages. This lets you, the animator, work in a familiar environment and workflow.
The Animation Workflow
The facial animation workflow with Retargeter is simple to learn and easy to understand. You’ll be creating animation in a matter of minutes and most users are up to speed and creating production quality animation in a week or two. It really is that easy.
By setting key poses on your facial rig, you’ll define a relationship between your actor and your character, which drives the animation. For example, when the actor smiles, you’ll define what the rig looks like when they smile. In doing this, you are “teaching” the software how to animate your shot.
By setting a key pose on each major facial movement, you teach the software how each shape looks on your character and it will intelligently fill in the in-betweens for you. This results in hundreds or even thousands of frames of animation being created in the time it takes to set a handful of key poses.
Designed by animators and built to get the job done.
Retargeter has been designed and dialed in over the years by a team of professional facial animators who needed to use the tool on a daily basis to produce industry leading facial animation. Our face animation software is battle-tested and has served teams of artists through thousands of minutes of facial animation in everything from feature films to AAA video game titles. Every feature in the Retargeter is there by animator request and for good reason. No fluff!
Pose-Based Retargeting
Animators have complete artistic freedom when using the Retargeter’s powerful pose-based workflow. By setting key poses on the facial rig, you quickly create a relationship between the actor’s performance and the desired look and feel of your character. The retargeting isn’t limited to humanoid characters either. You can retarget an actor’s performance onto an animal, a creature, even inanimate objects! This unique approach defines the animated result before any keyframes are applied to the rig, establishing cleaner, iterative results right from the start. Once poses are set, retargeted results are delivered in seconds and quick iterations can produce new results almost instantly.
Character Setup
The Retargeter easily integrates into any existing animation pipeline by utilizing the Character Setup tool. Through this simple and intuitive process, it’s easy to establish a connection between your character’s rig controls and the Faceware Retargeter for a fast and seamless integration into your workflow.
Shared Pose Library
Increase efficiency and team consistency with a Shared Pose Library. Lead or supervising animators can establish a character’s key poses in the shared library prior to starting animation, which the animators on the team can then utilize in the Retargeter to automatically deliver an initial animated result on the facial rig. This gives you the ability to create facial animation at an extremely fast pace, while maintaining a strong level of consistency and quality across your team.
Auto-Pose: Automatic Pose Suggestion
While animators are free to set key poses on any frame in a shot, utilizing the Auto-Pose feature brings another level of quickness and quality to the retargeting workflow. The automatic posing feature suggests the most extreme and dissimilar frames in the video performance, giving the artist a clear look at what are often the best places to place key poses. Along with suggesting where to put the poses, the Retargeter can also automatically pose your character on these frames, making the workflow even faster.
Animation Curve Refinement
Fine-tune your animated results by utilizing the software’s powerful key-reduction toolset. The intelligent pruning algorithm can re-solve the animation with a lower percentage of keyframes, making it cleaner and easier to polish while retaining the fidelity of the results. Smoothing, key spacing, and key-timing are also features of the Pruning Toolset. These tools allow an animator to tweak the output to find the best balance of high-quality and ease-of-use during their polishing.
Download and try Retargeter today.
Please fill out the brief form to the right to download a FREE fully functioning version of Faceware™ Retargeter. The software can be used on your own rigs or with the ones provided for evaluation in our free facial rig library. You can also visit the IMPD Performance Library to download additional performance data files for use with the evaluation version.
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