What you need to know
- Epic Games is the developer behind Fortnite.
- Its Unreal Engine 4 powers a lot of games.
- The company wants to increase its facial animation prowess.
- Epic Games acquired Cubic Motion, the company that did facial animation of God of War and other titles.
It seems like acquisitions in the gaming industry are still going on. Today, Epic Games announced that it was purchasing Cubic Motion, the creator of the facial animations used in Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and God of War. A report from GameSpot said the following.
Epic Games, owner of the Unreal Engine widely used across the games industry, has acquired the company behind the facial animation work deployed in games such as God of War and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. Cubic Motion is the creator of facial animation technology that is used in conjunction with facial rigs used for animations to produce subtle facial expressions that can be used to convey expressions in a more natural way. It's the reason Epic Games wants to include it in its suite of tools available to Unreal Engine developers.
Epic Games' Kim Libreri said the following about the acquisition.
Facial animation that conveys the slightest nuance of human expression is essential to crossing the uncanny valley. We believe that holistically combining Epic's Unreal Engine with 3Lateral's facial rig creation and Cubic Motion's solving technology is the only way to answer this challenge, and ultimately, to reach the pinnacle of digital human artistry with Unreal Engine.
With this, Unreal Engine 4 may be one of the most powerful and expansive engines on the market, more than it already is. It'll be interesting to see when this technology makes it way to developers who use Unreal Engine 4 and later iterations. It'll probably take a while, well into the Xbox Series X's generation, in my opinion.
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