ALICE.
ALICE is our comprehensive, end-to-end pipeline designed to capture, process, and meticulously craft lifelike digital humans that are fully customizable to your project’s needs. From scan processing to high-resolution look-dev and rigging, ALICE ensures a seamless workflow for creating characters suited for both offline and real-time applications. ALICE brings artistry and technical precision together to push the boundaries of digital realism.
One of the biggest challenges our clients face in achieving high-end facial animation is balancing time, cost, and complexity. With ALICE, we’re committed to solving these issues while continuously improving the realism of our product.
Join us as we take you through our process for creating a digital human—bringing cutting-edge tech to life.
We scan the talent.
Our sister company, Sample and Hold, provides top-tier scanning services to bring our characters to life with exceptional detail. Using a cutting-edge 156-LED lightstage, they produce ultra-high-resolution scans of the talent, capturing up to 81 distinct facial expressions. This process is guided by our in-house expression director, who ensures each scan reflects a full range of authentic emotions and nuances. These meticulously crafted scans form the foundation of our digital human creation, setting a new standard for fidelity and realism in character animation.
We process the data.
Once the scan is complete, each pose undergoes processing, where it’s carefully wrapped onto our custom topology and textures are mapped to their UV space. These texture maps encompass diffuse, normal, displacement, and specularity channels, capturing every detail from skin tone to fine surface texture. From there, our artists meticulously step in for any final cleanup, adding that critical polish to refine the last 10% and ensure each digital face is as realistic as possible. This attention to detail brings our digital humans to a standard of realism that truly stands out.
We build the shaders.
Whether developed for offline rendering in Arnold or real-time rendering in Unreal Engine 5, our commitment is to create skin, eyes, and teeth that push the boundaries of photorealism, capturing every detail from skin translucency to the subtle reflections in the eyes and the natural shine of teeth—we strive to deliver a level of realism in real-time rendering that rivals the quality of offline outputs. Our goal is to bridge the gap, achieving cinematic quality that feels just as real in real-time technology.
We groom the hair.
Realistic hair is essential to achieving lifelike digital humans, and we approach each aspect of grooming—eyebrows, eyelashes, peach fuzz, and hair—with the highest level of precision. Each groom is crafted to be versatile, seamlessly usable in both offline and real-time rendering environments. By paying close attention to the subtleties of hair flow and texture, we optimize for real-time environments without sacrificing quality, while also delivering stunning detail in offline renders. This dedication to hair realism brings our digital characters one step closer to true lifelike authenticity.
We make the rig.
We offer three distinct rigging options tailored to different project needs. The first option involves transforming our capture into a MetaHuman, making it fully compatible with the MetaHuman workflow and rigging system for streamlined integration. For simpler projects, we provide a 12-pose ALICE rig, ideal for basic facial movements. For the highest fidelity, our 81-expression rig captures even the most subtle facial nuances, from delicate wrinkle detail to changes in blood flow, offering unparalleled realism. Additionally, this rig can be driven by straightforward methods, such as iPhone capture, to animate facial expressions with ease, making it accessible for both high-end and agile production workflows.
Captured effortlessly with an iPhone, anyone can drive the rig and record any animation they envision. Once captured, the animation curves are cleaned up by our animators to refine the shapes and maximize their potential. The refined animation is then seamlessly imported into Unreal Engine, where we apply our materials and bind the grooms to the head for instant, stunning results. Take a look at the cinematic below to see how this entire process comes together in action.
Creating a life like digital double is hard. Think of ALICE as a starting point enabling…
CREATIVE CONTROL
Give your director the ability to work with a lifelike digital performance during an important motion capture session.
GREATER EFFICIENCY
Very little time with major sports star, but you still want extensive dialogue in the game? Easy.
FLEXIBILITY
Creating a commercial in 5 different languages is much easier when 3D scanning, character creation and motion capture is seamlessly integrated by one vendor.
CUTTING EDGE
VR and AR experiences are exploding but the production time and budget is always tight, ALICE returns your digital doubles already optimised for real time environments.
If you're interested in learning more about our ALICE service and how we create fully realized digital humans, we’d love to hear from you. Our team is ready to discuss how our advanced rigging options, high-fidelity captures, and real-time rendering capabilities can bring your characters to life.