Avengers
Darren Hendler, Lucio Moser, Rishabh Battulwar, David Corral, Phil Cramer, Ron Miller, Rickey Cloudsdale, Doug Roble · 2018
In Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos (played by actor Josh Brolin,) is entirely CG and is one of the the main characters in this live action movie. The plot depends on the emotional performances of this digital creature and it was imperative that Thanos's facial performance convey the actor's performances faithfully. Digital Domain's performance capture process, Direct Drive is a major departure from traditional blendshape solver techniques and was used to create Thanos's performances. We will present an overview of our updated multistage facial retargeting process. We have removed the reliance on high-resolution, per-shot facial capture and refined the process of training the system. This system is faster to set up, needs far less artist input, and preserves elements of the performance that were previously lost using traditional facial capture techniques.