Deus Ex: Human Revolution Facial Animation Interview

For something a little different, I highly recommend checking out this short interview on Develop, during which Cubic Motion director Gareth Edwards is quizzed about the animation company’s role in creating the facial animations for Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

How does Cubic Motion approach facial mocap with a game like Deus Ex?

We don’t see ourselves as a technology vendor, rather an animation studio with a very niche specialisation faces. Facial animation is so radically different from all other types of animation that we believe in collecting together a bunch of specialists who will spend all of their time focused on that alone.

We have no single fixed approach, and instead try to take an overall view of the right pipeline for each job. There are various capture methodologies we recommend for example, we think video data can be more powerful than marker-based mocap in a lot of circumstances but we’ll take any type of data from a client, including mocap, video or audio, and turn it into great animation.

As someone who has seen the impressive facial animations during dialogue firsthand, it’s clear to me that this company is good at what it does.