Audiomotion Studios & Speech Graphics Collaboration
Speech Graphics Ltd, an awarding-winning lip sync technology provider, and Audiomotion Studios Ltd, Europe’s leading motion capture service provider, today announced they are working together to combine audio-driven lip sync with full performance motion capture to offer a new, high-quality character animation service. The result could change the way character animation is executed in the future.
For their first combined demo, the team brought to life a 3D character based on a well-known celebrity, proving that the two technologies work well together. To do this, they simultaneously recorded audio and full performance, face, body and finger optical marker capture from a live actor. The motion capture drove the character’s body and upper face with the natural detail of the actor’s performance. Speech Graphics then used their audio-driven animation technology to procedurally drive the lower face, including the lips, jaw, cheeks, and even the tongue.
Michael Berger, co-founder and CTO of Speech Graphics, comments “Speech is challenging to capture due to occlusions of the lips and tongue, and the soft nature of the mouth. Our system fills the gap with highly accurate lip sync, and even conveys emotion through syllable intensity. Combining our audio-driven technology with Audiomotion’s performance capture gives a complete solution with emotional impact that is scalable to large amounts of facial animation.”
Creative Director at Audiomotion, Tim Doubleday, adds “Performance Capture allows us to create incredibly believable animations from our actor’s performance. There are always going to be elements that aren’t picked up by markers, such as the tongue. By using a hybrid system we’re able to fill those missing gaps and take the animation to a new level.”
The Speech Graphics technology works using a universal physical model and will work across all languages, saving game development time and resource.
About Audiomotion Studios
Audiomotion Studios is the multi-award winning, UK motion capture studio. For almost 15 years Audiomotion has specialised in the provision of motion capture services to the game development, film and television industries. Their state of the art facility is equipped with 140 MX40 cameras, enabling the largest in-house capture area in Europe.
Full Performance Capture is Audiomotion’s solution to capturing facial performance, fingers, full body and final audio simultaneously. The solution is being employed by many studios across Europe. For more information visit www.audiomotion.com or call +44 (0) 870 1600 504 or email info@audiomotion.com.