Photoreal CG animation takes the spotlight in the new short film Double, launched online recently by facial capture company DI4D. The piece harnesses the Glasgow-based developer’s latest PURE4D 2.0 solution to faithfully transfer award-winning performance capture and voice over actor Neil Newbon’s face onto his digital double.
As the studio explains, Double celebrates the art of acting, from its most ancient roots to its most modern digital form. The highly accurate reproduction of Newbon’s performance highlights the invaluable contribution skilled actors can make to video games and other animation projects.
“Double proves that it’s possible to produce high-end facial animation within a constrained budget,” said Colin Urquhart, CEO & Co-Founder of DI4D. “Acting lies at the heart of PURE4D 2.0’s approach, allowing studios to allocate more of their resources to talented performers, like Neil, who captivate audiences with their abilities. It’s this unique aspect that sets performance-driven animation apart from traditional pipelines.”
DI4D, know for providing highly realistic facial animation for triple-A games, blockbuster movies and critically-acclaimed series, like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, F1 23, Disney’s Haunted Mansion and Love, Death + Robots – In Vaulted Halls Entombed, created Double to demonstrate premium caliber animation with limited time and resources. Powering it is PURE4D, an innovative approach to facial animation that is entirely performance-driven — capable of producing realistic facial animation without a traditional facial rig that can adapt to any studio’s animation pipeline.
Using PURE4D 2.0, every nuance of Newbon’s performance was faithfully reproduced to deliver a level of realism approaching live action. By driving the animation directly from the facial performance, PURE4D reduces overall production costs and time by removing the hours spent adjusting traditional animation rigs. This allowed DI4D to create the entire CG short in-house. PURE4D 2.0 achieves this feat by combining performance data from a head-mounted camera with high-fidelity data from a seated 4D capture system. Proprietary machine learning technology learns the actor’s facial expressions, reducing subjective manual clean-up and significantly increasing consistency and efficiency.
“Developing an entire film from conception to the final render has been an incredible opportunity for the DI4D team,” added Douglas Green, CCO & Co-Founder of DI4D. “Not only have we demonstrated the level of quality possible with a small team and budget, but we now have an even greater understanding of our client’s processes which can only help to improve our services further.”
Newbon is an English actor, performance capture and voice artist who has appeared in more than 100 properties. He is best known for playing Karl Heisenberg in Capcom’s Resident Evil Village, Elijah Kamski and Gavin Reed in Quantic Dream’s Detroit: Become Human and Astarion in Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate III, for which he was nominated for a BAFTA Games Award and won The Game Award for Best Performance and the Golden Joystick Award for Best Supporting Performer. He also played Petra Fortis in the English-language version of the animated feature Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV.
Win 'The Art of DreamWorks Dog Man'! 
