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Overview
Faceporter is the software tool of choice to port MAYA face animations to MPEG4 players.
MPEG4 provides a standardized software platform for facial animations that is very useful for a number of applications related to avatar animation in any mobile, or www 3D graphics application. Despite the advantages of using MPEG4 for facial animation, notably in portability and compression, currently there are no proper facial animation tools for MPEG4 that can create art-level facial animations like the ones used in graphics, virtual reality, games, broadcasting and cinema applications. Since MPEG4 was initially designed having compression (not artistic quality applications in mind), many 3D designers rejected it as being a low artistic quality standard, despite their desire to port applications to MPEG4 for portability reasons and for creating cross- or multi-platform 3D graphics applications. However, this rejection is based on wrong reasons: MPEG4 does indeed have provisions and structures to provide high quality animations, if properly used. MAYA is the tool of choice for several 3D designers that use it to author/create artistic facial animations for the above mentioned applications.
Therefore, we have created Faceporter, a software solution consisting of two MAYA plug-ins (.mll) and the related .mel MAYA script files, that can be used to port MAYA facial animations to MPEG4 platforms and players.
Faceporter is the only software product internationally that can port MAYA facial animations to MPEG4 players and platforms!
Applications
Faceporter can be used to port artistic quality MAYA animations to MPEG4 platforms for the following types of applications:
Mobile services
Web applications with avatars
Human centered interfaces with avatars
Virtual actors
Virtual anchorpersons for news broadcasting over WWW.
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