PURE4D: Game-changing facial animation

PURE4D delivers world-leading facial animation by combining DI4D’s proprietary 4D facial capture technology with cutting-edge machine learning

LA and Glasgow-based DI4D provides the highest fidelity facial performance capture for leading visual effects and pre-rendered animation projects. Facial performance capture is the process of filming the facial movement of actors, analysing that data and using it to drive the facial animation of digital characters in video games and movie visual effects. By driving the facial animation of a digital character with an actor’s performance, especially when the character is a digital double of the actor, it is possible to obtain a very high level of realism while remaining faithful to the actor’s performance.

Since its formation in 2003, DI4D has contributed extensively to the innovation of facial performance capture technology by pioneering the use of stereo-photogrammetry and ‘4D capture’. Stereo-photogrammetry is a technique that allows a ‘3D scan’ to be derived simply from two digital images taken from different positions, similar to the way that humans’ stereo vision allows us to sense depth. One of the advantages of stereophotogrammetry is that it can be used with synchronised video cameras to capture ‘3D scans’ at video frame rates.

DI4D has also developed a method to track a dense 3D base mesh through such per-frame ‘3D scan’ data, resulting in ‘4D capture’, with time being the fourth dimension. Tracking a mesh with thousands of vertices in 3D allows 4D capture to produce much higher fidelity facial animation than is possible with traditional marker-based or sparse facial feature-based approaches to facial performance capture.