FacePro was founded in February 2007 by veteran game developer Rod Stafford, to provide the industry with high-quality facial animation services. By focusing on facial animation exclusively, FacePro has been able to develop a technique which rivals the quality of facial motion capture, but costs far less to produce – and is much more flexible in production.

This economy of method is passed on to the game developer community, making facial animation by FacePro both affordable, and very adaptive to different production environments. Revisions and changes are easily made via FacePro’s innovative REV animation interface, a Web-based application which provides fully transparent project management from any Web browser.

The REV interface is fully scalable, so any size project can be accommodated. Recent projects including 200-300 minutes of facial animation have been smoothly performed, on time and on budget.

FacePro provides free resources to the game developer community, in the interest of making low-cost, high-quality facial animation available to all. These resources include prebuilt and tested facial bone rigs, and rigging tutorials. To learn more about FacePro, visit facepro.net.

FacePro can create animation based on your own rig, or you can use one of the rigs provided by FacePro (you can check out the rigs and rig tutorial here). Then, using FacePro's web-based animation interface (REV), you work directly with FacePro animators to create the right character personality you are looking for.

FacePro animation output is available in several formats, including Max, Maya, and FBX (link). And, for an end-to-end character development solution, using the combination of Evolver, Mixamo, and FacePro, visit: http://facepro.net/acp.html

Beginning on Monday, February 1st, Rod Stafford will be on hand to answer any questions you might have concerning FacePro, or on his work in the game industry.

Rod Stafford [homepage]
My 3D career began in 1991, when I purchased a huge SGI Unix workstation running Version 1.0 of the “Alias” animation software – later to become Maya – the thing was the size of a small refrigerator and had a very primitive User interface, but it was 3D! We could only do simple things back then, but it was exciting to be part of a very small group doing high-end 3D at that time.

James Cameron had just released a film called “The Abyss”, which used the same Alias software to create a giant tentacle of water which menaced the live action characters in the film. I saw the film, and said “I need to be doing that.”

So I plopped down about $135,000.00 – a painful experience as I recall - for the SGI box and the Alias software, and then sat in my home studio for more than a year teaching myself how to create things and animate them in 3D. There was almost no training available in 3D at that time, so those of us who owned these systems had kind of an informal “help line” network going, to trade ideas and teach each other how to model, texture, animate, and render.

As a freelancer with my own high-end SGI system, I finally got my first gig, a 6-week production contract at ILM, George Lucas’ studio in San Rafael, CA. We were making an LBE (Location-Based Entertainment) ride film, and they hired me to do 3D pre-visualization of the sets, camera track animation, and vehicles – one of the first times 3D was used for setting up motion-control cameras for a live action film – very much like similar methods James Cameron used recently on “Avatar.”

ILM was a crucible of innovation then as now, and working with great ILM talents like Dennis Muren and Scott Squires on this project really set the bar for me – I still refer to things I learned at ILM, and the fun, collegial atmosphere is still my standard for how a production environment should be run. And the beautiful country setting of Skywalker Ranch was a big part of our inspiration to locate FacePro in the wilds of North Idaho.

After a few years of freelancing in Film and Broadcast, which were really the only markets for 3D at that time, the Video Game industry started to exploit the new technologies – and my career track took a permanent turn… the demand for what I had learned working on film contracts and TV commercials expanded something that no one could foresee, but the work was abundant and a lot more fun than the ultra-serious (and viciously competitive) film and broadcast market.

Since then I have been privileged to work for some very interesting companies, on some very interesting projects, including:

“Ecco II, The Tides of Time” (Angel Studios/SEGA)
“Mr. Bones” (Angel Studios/SEGA)
“Parasite Eve” (Square)
“Abe’s Oddysee” (Oddworld Inhabitants)
“Lands of Lore III” (Westwood Studios)
“Command and Conquer Renegade” (Westwood/EA)
“URU, Ages Beyond MYST” (Cyan Worlds/Ubisoft)
“MYST V, End of Ages” (Cyan Worlds/Ubisoft)

These were all studio gigs (working as an employee) – add about 20 other projects where I’ve contributed as a freelancer, and it’s been a busy 18 years or so!

In 2007, I founded FacePro to focus strictly on facial animation.