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Weta Digital’s FACETS honoured at the Sci-tech Awards
FACETS was one of the first reliable systems to demonstrate accurate facial tracking from an actor-mounted camera, combined with rig-based solving, in large-scale productions.
The system captures nuanced details of an actor’s facial performance, figures out how the muscles have moved, and then maps them onto virtual characters, even if the character has very non-human proportions. It can capture more than a dozen actors in a scene and allows for body capture to happen at the same time. This means the director is able to direct the action in much the same way as they would in a live production.
Outputted data can be easily edited, giving our animators full control over the solve. We have used the FACETS system on major facial capture projects including Avatar, The Adventures of Tintin, The Hobbit trilogy, and the Planet of the Apes trilogy.
The success of the FACETS system has changed the way we think of performance-driven animation, to the extent that we no longer regard motion capture and animation as alternative and separate activities.
FACETS was one of the first reliable systems to demonstrate accurate facial tracking from an actor-mounted camera, combined with rig-based solving, in large-scale productions.
To Luca Fascione, J.P. Lewis and Iain Matthews for the design, engineering, and development of the FACETS facial performance capture and solving system at Weta Digital.
Luca Fascione, J.P. Lewis, Iain Matthews