GDC: Facial Rigging Highlights this year

Facial rigging made giant leaps in games this past year to further come closer to film level quality. Some of the big stand outs that I saw at GDC and otherwise were from Crytek and from Bungie with their facial re-targeting systems. Ryse stood out a ton with their high fidelity and animation friendly rigs that gave 4D scan quality animation with easy customization.

Hit the jump for video and extra reference to how they these guys accomplished these high quality animations...

Here is the Ryse link. Note that there is also a ton of information on the GDC vault that showed this material in spades.
http://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-tech-of-cryteks-ryse-son-of-rome/

You can grab Bungie's animation re-targeting talk at the vault too which comes out in a few weeks.


As a bonus, here is how they rigged bodies and faces for The Last of Us at Naughty Dog:

As another added bonus, Here is a breakdown of John Hable's awesome facial re-targeting GDC talk that you can find here: http://www.filmicworlds.com/2014/02/17/facial-animation-demo/

Thomas the Ranger: Realtime Facial Animation Test from Filmic Worlds on Vimeo.