Courses

In Bungie’s upcoming video game Destiny, character creators needed to produce a variety of visually advanced content that would be rendered in real time for in-game scenarios and in-engine cinematics. This course explores the challenges and constraints presented by console hardware and the real-life production needs of Bungie’s pipelines for player and cinematic hair authoring and animation, and face-animation retargeting.

The course summarizes the techniques the character creators used to set up a future-proof geometry pipeline for hair rendering, developing hair shading that is integrated seamlessly into the full lighting pipeline for deferred rendering, and creating believable motion across a variety of console hardware. Topics include: how Bungie achieved high-quality face animation in in-engine real-time cinematics using face-animation retargeting; how tens of player-customizable heads shared a single animation across different human, alien, and robot races and genders; parameterization for the facial data for future-proofing the rigs; the tools and rig controls built for the animators; and evolution of the face-animation retargeting system.

Course Schedule

10:45 am
Introduction and Welcome
Tatarchuk

10:55 am
Hair in Destiny
Burke

11:25 am
Face Animation Retargeting in Destiny
Jones and Sanocki

12:10 pm
Questions and Answers