another markerless mocap....

[mirkoj]

Just saw this and it does look pretty good.. can;t to wonder.. whatever happened to once king of facial animation, all mighty Facerobot?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bX0qpsLfpE

Looks like FR is completely left to die...

[McNistor]

Autodesk manifests itself not very different than a parasite - it invades, it sucks the life out and then it discards, moving to the next target.
I for one, have no more expectations as I'm content with the idea that every s/w under Autodesk is going to stagnate in the best case scenario (max, maya) or wither away in time (the other countless software forgotten on a shelf somewhere).
Should Softimage be wacked anytime soon, I'll stay as far away from this company as I possibly can.

Doom&gloom post over.

[luceric]

face robot sucks and has never been the king of anything other than marketing

[McNistor]

face robot sucks and has never been the king of anything other than marketing

There has to be a big cognitive dissonance inside your head or you're changing your dancing on the changing rhythm because most of what you're critiquing about the Avid days can be tied loosely or closely to you and I'm pretty sure if you were on that side today you would be saying exactly the opposite. In this case, that FR is the king of whatever.

I'd be interested to know if you'd be talking about AD like this as well if and when they'll ever be your former employers. I'm pretty sure they'd be interested too.

[Bellsey]

personally I wouldn't necessarily agree with my learned colleague, I think Face Robot is actually very good at what it does and that's rigged heads for animation. Whilst there has been alot of development in recent years with capturing technology (like the one in this thread), I haven't seen much in the way of actually rigging for facial animation. Markerless capature is great, but like with normal mocap, it doesn't really eliminate the need of an animation rig. You still have to often retarget the animation and then post animate it.

Face Robot has always suffered from a stigma of some kind and many have put that down to the high price point it had on it's first release. In some ways, it's never seemed to shake that of. Everyone I've ever shown Face Robot too has liked it and has seen it's value, but despite this, adoption was hard. It's a kinda niche product that will only appeal to certain customers doing particular work.

My personal frustration with Face Robot is that it hasn't really moved on in recent years. It does work and I know people who use it, but it's always felt like there are areas to it that slightly slightly unfinished. Personally (and in hindsight) I would of preferred it to have remained a separate package.

[luceric]

FaceRobot has these problems:

1) it's slow and you generally cannot play back animation real time (right there that's a no go for any animation tool that's supposed to be optimized for one purpose)
2) doesn't work on an already rigged character
3) it's inflexible and cannot work on animal faces, non human monsters, etc. Basically only works well with the faces similar to the ones in the tutorial.
4) Doesn't support more than one head, cannot animate a conversation.
5) it's a black box "magic" rig with a rigid workflow and not customizable
6) doesn't support live mo cap input. see 1)

It's rig and a rig maker that's written in javascript, so it's just as good as another TD could do.

So as far as a facial animation system goes, where is the greatness. If anyone is hitting reply right now to defend it, first ask yourself if you're getting worked up to defend these limitations because
a) you've used the system and you know some technical superior advantage about it
b) you've used it in production and it's really saved your butt compared to doing your own rig or doing blendshapes
or
c) it's just an emotional response to the name "face robot" that you believe (as in religious faith) has to be great, even if you can't explain why ATM. That's the power of marketecture, putting a name on some vague advantage to get you to feel emotional and irrational about it

Because FR is a rig maker and a rig, if it would be necessary to re-write both parts for whatever reason to make it useful, that basically means there is nothing to be kept except the brand name. I don't think this same standard is applied in this forum to features of other products.

Face Robot was written in 2005, I'm not sure what the statute of limitation is on pointing out there might have been not much in there except good marketing. it hasn't been the king of facial animation because very few production ever used it, for all the reasons above and some more, and it's not clear the benefits it brings over other solution. It's there to be used and free now, it's not hidden behind some expensive support contract.

[Bellsey]

Indeed, I'm in agreement with alot of what you say. I'm not defending Face Robot in putting it on some kind of pedestal of awesomeness and greatness, the limitations listed are perfectly fair (although Jeff and I did test a goat/hogs head and it worked fine, but yeah only humanoid structures work).

Although the rigging system could be replicated by a good TD, this isn't necessarily an easy thing to do. There's still a fair amount of work to be done to build a good facial animation system (even these days) and not every studio has the skills and people to perhaps do that. Some might do but it might depend on the scope of work they do and the investment they're willing to make.
For an SMB business, whose invested in some Suites, then Face Robot is perhaps worth looking at for something. All in all, it's not bad really for what it is right now. I saw a studio (Max based) recently try it and within a couple of weeks, they'd knocked something out that looked very good.

[McNistor]

Bellsey, I think he refers to me "getting worked up" and he's right, but I'm not getting worked up because the sight of "face robot sucks" makes my blood boil.
I too think it has a lot of limitations (which shouldn't be that way by now, but that's another story), I'm getting worked up because you luceric often come here, throw your little Mentos in the Pepsi pet with things like Avid did that, Softimage is that and so on. If you didn't have the balls to say these things then, I think it's only fair to shut up about it now.

Care to tell us what is Autodesk doing wrong now or you'll wait until you're not their employee and tell us how hard Maya sucks?

You had the chance to make them (the products) better while you were at Avid and for a while at AD and to speak up against those who you thought didn't do very well towards this goal and while I think it's your right to speak whatever and whenever you want, doing this makes you a hypocrite.

[mirkoj]

It seems to me that point of my first post is a bit missed. For that I can only curse my english skills.

Back in the days FR was king.. there was nothing similar and able to produce anything it did back then. At least I'm not aware of it, ofc unless you have some nasty TD behind you to build full couple hundreds bones and blend shapes facial rig that can even try to simulate softness of the flesh under the face.
I always hated blend shapes for facial animation and do till this day as well. As a bit of correction shape system ok but as main force behind facial animation.. so bad!
FR was refreshment.

Now back to today, my point is that FR stayed back in 2006, never moved a bit and that is a problem.
Nice rewrite having updated modern, maybe ICE rig behind rigging part and good connection with nice markerless or similar mocap system... web cams with HD resolution and great details are here for years now, kinect as well.... just as examples.
So point is |FR just stayed where it was, got beating and trumped all over with new tech. But it still can give better results than some poor blend shape rig, and with all it's imitations it still can give something.. Did Blur move from Face Robot? I know that there were couple youtube videos showing Blur workflow with extensively used Face Robot.. or it was just plain marketing talk....

So, it does look like FR is left to die with all of it's cons and pros never touched again since added automatic lip sync. And on top of that add all those new great tools targeted and Maya and SI mostly left out.. THAT is the part that hurts... not bad feelings for FR.....

[Helli]

Anyone remembers Behavior ?
I dived into that and invested quite some time just to see it disapear.

As soon as Facerobot was added to Softimage I knew what will/would happen to it.
I will not invest a single second into learning the workflow cause it is allready a dieing product.