Animation Artist

The Face

Foundation Imaging relies on mo-cap for shows like "Max Steel" (top), combined with character animation tools found in packages like LightWave (bottom).

Although facial motion capture has made strides in recent years, most character-heavy projects still do the bulk of their facial work with a keyframe approach.

"[PDI] has taken a different facial approach with Shrek than we did with Antz," says Hui. "In Antz, we did not have all major facial muscles built in, under the skin. But for Shrek, we have more advanced proprietary tools for this purpose, so the characters have more muscles working in their faces and even down their necks. When Shrek moves his head, you see the fat rotating and bulging on his neck. We spent a long time writing code to improve this aspect. We also wrote a new lip-synch software, with a facial library that lets animators lock mouth moves to the soundtrack and then simply nuance those moves as needed. Our most photo-real human character, Princess Fiona, has more muscles around her eyes and mouth than anything we've ever done before."

But the biggest breakthrough on Shrek may be its most subtle. "Fiona's mouth features that characteristic that happens when your lips stick together and then come apart for a second when you open your mouth," says Adamson. "We feel we made her speech and mouth convincing by adding this characteristic. We did it with a proprietary tool we call 'Lipstick,' which controls the opening of the mouth, the compression of the lips, and how much and for how long they adhere to each other."

Final Fantasy's Jones is also proud of that film's progress in the area of the human eye. He says such advances resulted from years of observation combined with proprietary tools.

"The big challenge with eyes, we found, was in timing-when people move their eyes in the middle of a sentence, how often they blink, and so on," says Jones. "In particular, animators often make a common mistake of thinking that when a head scans across a room, the eyes move in concert with the head. Actually, the eyes make a lot of subtle 'hits' as the head is moving, darting in different directions. We built a proprietary system that drives that movement, moistens the eyes, and moves the skin around the eyes as the eyeball itself moves."

What's Real?
All these issues, of course, are central to the ongoing industry debate over so-called "photo-realism," and whether it's even a worthwhile goal.

Certainly, recent experiments -- such as the LifeFX motion-capture breakthrough a couple of years ago to create an impressive, completely digital face of actor Jim Carrey for the currently shelved feature film The Incredible Mr. Limpett -- have proven how tantalizing such a goal is.

On the other hand, leaving aside questions about whether such complicated and time-consuming approaches are cost-effective in modern production settings, many industry professionals consider photo-realism a moot search. Even Jones admits that, despite publicity suggesting that Final Fantasy features "photo-real" characters, they are really "as close as possible to photo-real, but it's still obvious this is an animated movie."

According to Pixar's Catmull, photo-realism is "simply not relevant."

"Anything animated, you know it's an artistic creation, and therefore not reality in these films," says Catmull. "Therefore, from an animation point of view, why bother worrying about photo-realism? It's not important. At Pixar, we'll make whatever image we need to make to tell the story, but we aren't about to pretend they aren't animated."

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