Three Methods for Making of Character Facial Animation based on Game Engine

Machinima is digital visuals created with game engines that build real-time 3D CG (computer graphic) environment. Composition of scene and facial animation play important role in composition of Machinima’s videos. Character facial animation is frequently used in scene composition that mainly displays face and upper body of the character. Expressing character’s emotion is an important factor in describing story of the animation. This paper provides three methods for character facial animation based on game engine, and applied them to real facial animation of Machinima characters. Through this process, we could match the most suitable facial animation to three types of scene composition by analyzing scene composition of the most renowned game of Machinima, ‘Walking dead-episode1’. Morph animation is suitable for medium close up and medium shot. Motion capture is efficient for over shoulder shot. However, during the process of combining body motion and facial animation, Motion capture was more difficult to reuse resources than morph animation and animated texture. When making pipelines for an independent video content, these findings could contribute to establishment of efficient resource production process based on real time rendering technology, which is a strength of game engine. In addition, this research provides guidelines of suitable production method best suitable to special traits of character animation.