Metro Exodus facial animation: Internal perspective

What the talk is about

Andrey Sibiryakov describes how he set up automatic facial animation for dialogue on Metro Exodus so that it looks organic. He separated mouth opening from phoneme pronunciation, added sticky lips, built priority rules for phonemes in fast speech, and layered emotion states and text tags on top. The core of the talk is a review of mistakes. Two small ones: blinks clashing between two animation systems, and leftover custom nodes corrupting files. The big one: over two years chasing a perfect one-button system built from face scans and automatic blendshape transfer. It failed, so he simplified, let the bones be placed chaotically and used a simple transfer tool. Along the way he produced useful scripts for weight import, mocap sync and localization. Useful for technical animators and riggers.