Attached Link: http://www.softimage.com/products/face_robot/video_gallery/default.aspx

Attached Link: Facial anim experiment

Wish I had it for this animation though. (This is that short clip I was talking about in our conversation last evening). Nothing major, just working on some facial animation. Got the eyes to jitter with a noise modifier affecting the position track. I think it worked out ok.

Would like to put some sound to it.

Nice :) I have seen the facerobot demo videos but I haven't seen the workflow yet. I would really like to see a hands-on video to see how they actually setup the facial rig and how you work on the animation. Right now to me face robot looks like a fancy way to add clusters to your face to animate it...

So how much is it? I didn't see a price?!

It's $95,000 for Facerobot Designer, and $15,000 for Facerobot Animator.

It's just one lottery ticket away.

You gotta be kidding me... one could buy nearly 15 seats of the high-level XSI instead of facerobot designer! That program better be REAL good... as in "I just have to imagine it and the animation is there!"

"That program better be REAL good... as in "I just have to imagine it and the animation is there!""

Well, it's almost like that. It specializes in mocap of target facial groups, and translates that to the customized mesh that simulates deep muscle movement. It also allows manual input of keyframe manipulation on top of that, so the mocap can be tweaked to perfection. It saves animators tons of time in animating facial expressions and speech, with results that are exact to a live actor's own.

In that sense, the extremely high price is worth it to studios who can afford to write it off as a business expense, and need the technology to save time and money in the long run. It certainly is not for a hobbyist, or even the individual professional, at that price. I'm assuming, like with everything else, the price will eventually drop like a rock (remember when a seat of Maya used to cost $30,000 and only ran on SGI workstations? It was called Alias PowerAnimator back then). Right now, however, it's highly specialized software, so they give it a ridiculous price... because they can. ;-) Message edited on: 03/21/2006 10:39

I wondering if the people at Avid when they were kids tried to sell lemonade at 25 dollars a glass, thinking that they only have to sell one glass? Dale

Let's look at the more recent examples... anybody remembers how much they charged for Massive when it first came out?

" Let's look at the more recent examples... anybody remembers how much they charged for Massive when it first came out?"

Yes. $40,000 USD. It's around $22,000 with license and support today. Message edited on: 03/21/2006 11:09

This program is very reminiscent of Facestation by Eyematic. The video/demo put out by Eyematic back then is very nearly identical to the one put out for this program. However, I beleive Facestation was a flop as I haven't read anything about it for awhile.

great looking app. the price is pretty steep for it thought. i can see it coming down pretty fast and pretty soon. unless they want to share the marketplace. maybe im missing something...