Morrisville, North Carolina, April 13, 2005 - OC3 Entertainment has announced the release of FaceFX, a new facial animation product for games and 3D applications. FaceFX improves and expands upon OC3 Entertainment's existing facial animation technology which is widely used by the gaming industry's most respected developers.
Morrisville, North Carolina - October 27, 2004 - Over the past few years, an increasing number of game developers have relied on OC3 Entertainment’s technology to help create realistic talking characters. Convincing facial animation is extremely difficult to achieve due to the immense amount of information humans are capable of communicating with subtle facial gestures. Meanwhile, game developers are challenged with great quantities of dialog sequences and shortened development timelines, driving them to use the most efficient tools and technology on the market.
Automated lip-synchronization software made available to Xbox game developers
Morrisville, North Carolina - February 26th, 2003 - Morrisville, North Carolina, February 26, 2003 – OC3 Entertainment, Inc. announced today that it has signed an Xbox Tools and Middleware agreement with Microsoft to provide automated lip-synchronization solutions for the Xbox™ video game system from Microsoft. The agreement will allow OC3 Entertainment to expand its Impersonator™ product line onto the Xbox platform and provide a real-time solution for Xbox™ Live™.
Morrisville, North Carolina - September 6, 2002 - OC3 Entertainment, Inc. officially opens for talking today and announces that it has acquired LIPSinc’s TalkBack®, LiveTalk™, and Impersonator™ software development kits for sale into the gaming market. The technology utilizes audio input to drive realistic facial movements for game characters.
FaceFX is OC3 Entertainment’s cutting edge solution for creating realistic facial animation from audio files. FaceFX is the culmination of years of experience working with lip-synchronization, 3D graphics, and facial animation. The product makes it easy to batch process thousands of WAV files for your game, add expressions to a single animation without ruining the lip-synchronization, tweak an animation to perfection, or integrate the entire solution into your art pipeline.
Lip-synchronization is the process of matching audio to the movement of the mouth. FaceFX boasts highly accurate lip-synchronization with the following features:
Gestures are the movements that accompany speech. They make the character's head and body look natural while the dialogue is being spoken. FaceFX can generate head rotations, eyebrow raises, blinks, hand gestures, and other gesture curves. The FaceFX gesture system is completely customizable and the existing gesture profiles or Analysis Actors can be modified or you can create a new gesture system from scratch to achieve your artistic vision.
The Face Graph is the brains of the FaceFX solution. It allows the artist to model complex facial interactions while maintaining simple controls. The artist can combine any combination of bone poses, morph targets, and material properties into a single target and drive it with a single curve. When two targets conflict with each other to produce unwanted artifacts or poor lip-synchronization, the Face Graph can correct for these situations by forcing one of the target values down.
FaceFX includes plugins for the following Autodesk products: 3D Studio Max, Maya, Softimage, and MotionBuilder. FaceFX plugins are used to generate bone poses and import animation data. Max, Maya, and XSI plugins feature powerful scripting functions that let you integrate FaceFX data into your custom production pipeline.
In addition to animation plugins, the FaceFX Studio application can export animation data to FBX files directly. OC3 Entertainment also maintains Ogre exporters for 3D Studio Max and Maya.