Create facial animation in realtime with Faceware Studio

Faceware Live gets replaced with Studio.

Faceware Technologies has released Faceware Studio, a new platform for creating high-quality facial animation in realtime. The company says that Faceware Studio has been built from scratch to completely replace Faceware Live product. In future updates, Studio will serve as the platform for all of Faceware’s technology and product updates. Users of Faceware Live who have active support can upgrade to Faceware Studio easily. A 30-day free trial of Faceware Studio is available at the website.

Faceware Studio uses machine learning and the latest neural network techniques to track and animate a person’s face in realtime. The realtime animation data may be streamed over TCP/IP to any supported Faceware client plugin or custom-built solution. Currently, Faceware Studio integrates with Unreal Engine, Unity, and Autodesk MotionBuilder. The support for Maya is coming soon.

**The streaming panel offers a lot of options to enable and customize the data stream. (Source: Faceware Technologies, Inc.)**

“This is more than just a rebranding of our Live product—Faceware Studio is a complete re-engineering of our realtime platform,” said Peter Busch, vice president of business development at Faceware Technologies. “Based on what we’ve learned from the market over the past few years about how people create and work with realtime facial animation, we re-thought the entire product from the ground up to make it easier to use, more intuitive, and to produce higher quality animation. The initial response during the beta was extremely positive, and we’re excited to be releasing it for all of our users.”

The features of Faceware Studio include:

Enhanced facial tracking technology
Studio contains sweeping updates to our underlying tracking technology, leveraging the latest machine learning techniques to improve the quality and robustness of our tracking and animation. Users will enjoy better results across an even wider range of cameras and capture scenarios with both live video and pre-recorded media.
Realtime jaw positioning using deep learning
Faceware’s improved jaw positioning tech, which is currently used in Faceware Retargeter, is now available in Studio, giving users the ability to create fast and accurate lip-sync animation in realtime.
Motion effects & animation tuning
Studio gives users unparalleled and direct control over their final animation. Visualize and adjust actor-specific profiles with animation tuning and build powerful logic into the realtime data stream using motion effects.
Realtime animation viewport and media timeline
Users can see their facial animation from any angle with Studio’s fully-featured 3D animation viewport and use the timeline and media controls to pause, play, and scrub through their media to find ideal frames for calibration and to focus on specific sections of their video.
Dockable, customizable interface
A modern and customizable user interface with docking panels and saveable workspaces that allow for a completely personalized setup.
Improved CPU/GPU performance
The studio is greatly optimized to create better and faster results while using fewer resources than its predecessor. Along with the optional “optimize for realtime’ feature, users will enjoy higher frame-rate tracking across a much wider range of hardware.