Facial Animation at Scale: Producing facial animation for 24 hours of narrative content in “Horizon: Forbidden West”

This talk covers the complete pipeline and process used to generate facial animation data for all the narrative content in the latest installment of the Horizon game series, created by Guerrilla. We developed a proprietary technique for embedding per-frame timecode and source take information into all our narrative animation data as the basis of this pipeline. Then we added a fully automated facial animation solving pipeline where animators could push animation quality by improving generic FaceWare models. Any update to these models would automatically cause the re-processing of all dependent facial animation data. To manage all this data a review pipeline was set up in Atlassian Jira that provided both a high-level overview as well as granular control over the more than 15.000 narrative facial animations in the game.