Concord - Facial Shapes, Wrinkle map shaders and Rigging ..oh my!

I was responsible for all the facial shapes for Concord, and any facial tech needed to get animation out to shaders in Unreal. I used metahuman to establish the base shapes and created a workflow so that we could art direct facial expressions and extract individual components for the blendshapes. When I first began working on the project my timeline was 3 weeks which included working with Sony’s Visual Ars group to QA the rig. Toward the end of the project, I was able to get the total time down to 1 week for human like characters. This was achieved through some python scripting where I had automated a large part of the expression tuning and extraction. All roms seen here have bespoke blendshape libraries tailored specifically for each character. Even though I spent some time polishing the animations for this post, since they are sharing the same rom, some roms are a bit better than others.

Other tasks I was responsible for were creating the shading networks in Maya so that animators could visualize animations that were to be driven by shaders in unreal. I was also responsible for Unreal Shader logic for wrinkle maps which were based off logic developed by the Metahuman team.

Thanks Mack Kade for the great thumbnail idea!

• Character Faces
o Lennox Face | 3d artists: Will Patrick (Concept sculpt and base forms) | Brad Shortt (Polish and texture, and shaders)
o StarChild Face | 3d artists: Brad Shortt (Look dev and base forms) | Chris Coleman (Polish, textures and materials and hair work)
o Itzy Face | 3d artists: Mackenzie Kade
o Jabali Face | 3d artists: Lorraine Howard III
o Emari Face | 3d Artists: Fiona Ng, Alsu Rakhimova (Hair)
o Haymar Face | 3d artists: Chris Bennett
o Daveers Face | 3d artists: Jason Ahn, Brad Shortt, Chris Bennett
o Lark Face | 3d artists: Chris Bennett
o Daw Face | 3d artists: Cheyne Hessler, Brad Shortt, Mackenzie Kade (Hair) Chris Bennett (Hair)
o Duchess Face | 3d artists: Lorraine Howard III
o Teo Face | 3d artists: Chris Bennett
o Bazz Face | 3d artists: Jared Chavez
o Vale Face | 3d artists: Alsu Rakhimova, Brad Shortt, Lorraine Howard III
• One-Off Model: Konrad Honey
• Face Rig and pipeline – Sean Nolan (Base facial rig) | Henri Tan (One Off rigging) | Rucha Muley (Kyps Rigging)
• Animation Rom – Sony Visual Arts Group

https://www.artstation.com/mackenzie_kade
https://www.artstation.com/normalized
https://www.artstation.com/bennettchris
https://www.artstation.com/jchavez21
https://www.artstation.com/loraine_howard_iii
https://www.artstation.com/gruntpunch
https://www.artstation.com/fiona-ng
https://www.artstation.com/artdungeon
https://www.artstation.com/artistwill
https://www.artstation.com/konradsilver