Eiskoservices.com - Speed-up your blendshape workflow !

Hi there !

I work at EISKO, a studio specialising in 3D scanning and reconstruction, and we are stoked to be announcing the release of Blendshapes on Demand®, an online service that gives a complete set of blendshapes to any head model you upload, perfectly fitting your character morphology. Feels like it could really help the community, independent artists or studio alike!

How does it work?

It’s all happening at eiskoservices.com, select a Blendshape package (more to come soon) and upload the character head model(s) that you wish to give the blendshapes to. You’ll simply receive a confirmation email when it’s done, less than half an hour after, with a link towards your fbx file.

What’s in the package?

Our first available set of blendshapes includes more than 120 blends and covers all facial action units linked to muscular deformations, visemes and emotions. You can see them in details here . It’s awesome and works with any topology and character style (cartoon, photorealistic, or anything in between).

If you already have a set of blendshapes that you want to transfer to other characters, no problem at all, our platform also works with custom deformations (just select the custom blendshapes option from the shop page).

We are still working on the website and on some more awesome tools (can’t tell you much at this stage apart from that it will tackle rigging or UVs!). Feel free to check out the FAQ section of our site and subscribe to our mailing list to be the first to receive all the news on these game-changer tools.

Let us know what you think of it!

Cheers

BaguetteFX

 

You've got a problem in that you are advertising a launch price of $99 as if that were a commercial price but a little bit of investigation reveals that is the normal Creative Commons Non-Commercial License price and the commercial price is actually $499.

 

That's pretty steep for indie

 

That's 5000€ for 10 heads, I hope you are not doing 100 characters

 

Not really, you only pay for the what you need (it's not like you are having to invest in a huge software package), and it saves you a lot of time it could be very cheap.

 

My time is still cheaper, and they seems to do it with algorithm, I'm sure it's a mean square error minimization like stuff with recognition of landmark (eye, nose). How long before someone replicate this in this bedroom for cheap?

It seems they have a single source they will reuse for transfer, which might be the true center of their offering and it seems it's just a photogrammetric scan refit to a handcraft mesh they further retrofit to your mesh ...

I think they will benefit from volume more than expensive license and offer on top of that a true service with acting capture to transfer to the blendshape. Because it's useless with quality animation data. They could also have a library of generic animation to allow mass effect like composition. This is the most useful service indie are lacking.

 

You are not speaking for most indies though. Many are using tons of assets and services to get what they need, and if they are using things like playmaker to get basic game functionality, using as service like that is going to pretty reasonable if they need to simply add facial expressions to something they bought off the shelf.

 

You still need the animation to feed it, the blendshape aren't automatic, that's overkill for simple expression, and the quality they provide (cheek, noses, etc...) do need good data to be worth the price.

 

I'd want to see the results for one head and at a CC NC License price although honestly the models I have have blendshapes already and plenty of configured expression targets and more - although I'm not a big fan of a lot of the expressions the DAZ/Poser models have that I have licensed and would consider supplementing them. Trouble is those things do add even more size to your models.

 

If my credit card wasn't restricted due to stupid mobile double check because I don't an expensive mobile, I would have tried it and posted the result, I want to know how well it work with low poly model I have (3000 poly range for whole character, face fully rig).

 

Definitely interesting, have done some scripting with morph targets some years ago, and this looks nice.

So the process is not completely automatic?

Is it possible to transfer shapes to asymmetric faces (mutants and other deformed creatures) ?

Is it possible to have mouths without interiors or mouths with complete interior "sack"?

Is it possible to have different neutral poses (mouth open/ lips closed) as starting point ?

Anyway, looking good

 

Sorry about your mobile neoshaman... Anyway, this is a test we made on a free model from Dota2 quite low-res (510poly).

 

Thanks eses,

- It is fully automated indeed, took us a while to dev our way there but it's operational.
- Yeah works fine on pretty much any creatures as long as it's got eyes/nose/mouths to deform obvs
- No pbs for mouth interiors either, the "sack" is preserved and will adapt to the expressions
- yes, it can deal with any expressions as neutral pose. Yet the simpler the pose (eyes open, lips closed), the better the results

Cheers
BaguetteFX

 

@BaguetteFX - That looks pretty nice!

 

That's great! Thanks!