Facial animation has traditionally been a difficult subject in computer animation. Good results are difficult, so game developers typically shy away from putting lip-sync in games. However with the increasing realism coming from today's workstation quality graphics accelerators and the next generation of consoles, it is an area which needs to be addressed.

Thus, for this project, I decided to cover the area of facial animation for games. As I will show, games have traditionally had very poor facial animation – a situation which is slowly changing, but for the majority of cases still has a long way to go. I decided I would look at alternative methods to those currently used, and compare them with the current methods and each other.

I decided this was a good opportunity to innovate within this field, and was a creative challenge. It would also allow me to experiment with MEL scripting, which I have not previously used. I also hoped to gain valuable experience with working with games technology, which is ideal as I hope to enter the games industry upon graduation.

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