Softimage^® Face Robot^® allows you to easily rig and animate life-like faces. It lets you quickly set up a face rig by taking you through several defined stages. Once you have a face rig, you can animate the facial controls with either mocap or keyframes, then sculpt and tune the facial tissue using tools that are specific to Face Robot, as well as standard Softimage ones. Because it's quick to set up the face rig, you are free to spend your time perfecting your character's emotions and facial expressions, thus delivering unforgettable performances.

Life-like facial animation is one of the most difficult problems to solve in 3D, and one of the most important things to get right. Face Robot uses a soft tissue model of the human face that slides and deforms, which lets you work at a higher level of abstraction. Instead of building shapes for each expression, the face can be manipulated directly through the salient features of facial anatomy, such as the corners of the mouth, the eyebrows, the jaw, and so on.

For motion capture animation, Face Robot requires only a small number of markers (only 25 to 30), yet provides high-quality results because the markers drive a landmark-driven soft tissue model that fills in the gaps.

Image Courtesy of Blur Studios