Give Your Characters Emotional Depth That Players Feel
When characters express genuine emotion through subtle facial movements, players connect on a deeper level. Our facial capture systems bring that expressive power to your arcade game.
Back to HomeWhat Facial Capture Adds to Your Characters
Imagine your characters communicating not just through dialogue or actions, but through the subtle raise of an eyebrow, the slight curve of a smile, the intensity of focused eyes. These micro-expressions add layers of personality that make characters feel genuinely alive and relatable.
That's what facial capture brings to your game. Using high-resolution cameras, we track every nuance of facial movement—from broad expressions like joy or anger to subtle shifts that convey uncertainty, determination, or mischief. The result is characters with emotional depth that resonates with players.
Your Characters Will Express:
Whether your characters are realistic humans or stylized arcade heroes, facial animation adds dimension that static expressions simply can't provide. A fighter showing determination before a match, a hero displaying concern for an ally, a villain's confident smirk—these emotional moments enhance storytelling and gameplay immersion.
The system we create for your characters becomes a flexible tool. With comprehensive blend shape libraries, you can mix and match expressions, create custom variations, and respond to any emotional moment your game requires. It's like giving your animation team a complete emotional vocabulary for each character.
The Challenge of Expressive Characters
You've invested in creating compelling characters with interesting designs and personalities. But when it comes to facial animation, you're facing a challenge that's surprisingly difficult to solve well. Hand-crafted facial expressions take enormous time to create, and even then, they often look stiff or limited.
Maybe you've worked with basic blend shape sets, only to find they don't provide enough range for genuine emotional expression. The smile looks generic, the frown is too simple, and creating convincing subtle emotions like worry or suspicion feels nearly impossible without extensive manual sculpting.
Or perhaps your characters currently use minimal facial animation—maybe just basic mouth shapes for dialogue and a few simple expressions. You know this limits how much personality your characters can convey, but creating comprehensive facial animation from scratch feels daunting given your production timeline.
The technical side presents its own obstacles. Setting up facial animation systems, creating blend shapes, and managing the complexity of facial rigs requires specialized knowledge. Your team may not have experience with this aspect of character animation, and learning it while trying to complete other aspects of the game adds pressure.
You recognize that emotional expression matters, especially in story-driven arcade games or titles where character personality is central to the experience. But finding a way to achieve quality facial animation within your budget and timeline feels like yet another production challenge competing for limited resources.
Our Comprehensive Facial Capture System
At Motion Lab, we've designed our facial capture approach to give you everything needed for expressive character animation: the capture technology, the performance expertise, and the technical setup that makes it all work in your game engine.
Our system uses high-resolution cameras that track facial movement with remarkable precision. We capture not just the obvious expressions, but the subtle muscle movements that create authentic emotion—the slight tension around eyes during concentration, the way cheeks move during different types of smiles, the micro-expressions that happen before emotions fully form.
How We Build Your Facial System:
Character Analysis
We review your character models to understand facial topology and design style. This helps us plan capture that works with your specific characters, whether realistic or stylized.
Expression Library Capture
Experienced performers create a comprehensive range of expressions—from neutral poses to intense emotions, from subtle reactions to dramatic displays. We capture everything your game might need.
Blend Shape Generation
We process captured data into clean blend shapes optimized for real-time use. Each shape represents a specific facial movement, from phonemes for dialogue to emotional expressions.
System Integration
Receive your facial animation system ready for Unity, Unreal, or custom engines. Includes documentation showing how to combine blend shapes for any expression you need.
The performers we work with understand how to create expressions that translate well to game characters. They know how to exaggerate slightly for stylized designs, or how to deliver subtle naturalism for realistic characters. This expertise ensures the captured expressions work beautifully when applied to your character models.
What you receive isn't just raw capture data—it's a complete facial animation system. The blend shapes are organized logically, optimized for performance, and documented so your team can immediately start creating custom animations. Whether you're animating cinematics, creating reactive expressions for gameplay, or building dialogue systems, everything you need is included.
This approach removes the technical complexity from your team while giving you professional-quality facial animation. Instead of spending months learning facial rigging and sculpting expressions, you receive a turnkey system that your animators can use productively from day one.
Creating Your Facial Animation System
Working with us to create your facial capture system is a collaborative process designed to ensure the final system matches your creative vision and technical requirements.
We begin with a consultation about your characters and emotional needs. What range of expressions do your characters need? Are there specific personality traits you want to emphasize? What technical constraints does your game engine have? Understanding these details helps us plan capture that serves your project perfectly.
The Development Journey:
During the capture session, we work through a comprehensive expression list. Our performer creates each expression while cameras track every facial movement. You can attend the session to provide direction, or we can work from your expression reference if remote participation works better for your schedule.
We capture expressions in logical groups: basic emotions first, then variations and intensities, followed by subtle reactions and micro-expressions. This systematic approach ensures we create a complete library that covers all your needs without gaps or redundancy.
After capture, our technical team processes the data into blend shapes. This involves cleaning tracking data, sculpting shapes onto your character model, and ensuring each blend shape deforms naturally. We test combinations to verify that mixing expressions produces believable results.
You receive preview builds throughout processing so you can see how expressions look on your actual character. This feedback loop lets you request adjustments before final delivery, ensuring the system meets your expectations.
The final deliverable includes the complete blend shape library, organized documentation, and example animations showing how to combine shapes for complex expressions. Many clients also appreciate the reference video we provide showing the original captured performances, which helps animators understand the intent behind each expression.
We provide integration support to help your team get the system working in your game engine. Whether you're setting up facial animation blueprints in Unreal or configuring blend shape animation in Unity, we're available to answer technical questions and help solve implementation challenges.
The typical timeline from initial consultation to final delivery is three to four weeks. This includes capture, processing, blend shape generation, and any refinements based on your feedback. Rush processing is available if your production timeline requires faster delivery.
Investing in Emotional Connection
A comprehensive facial animation system represents an investment in how players experience and connect with your characters. The emotional dimension that facial expressions add can significantly enhance storytelling impact and player engagement with your game.
Complete System Includes:
Optional Enhancements:
The value extends beyond the immediate project. Once you have a facial animation system for one character, creating systems for additional characters becomes more efficient—we can reuse capture data and processing pipelines, which is why subsequent characters are offered at a reduced rate.
Consider also the time savings for your team. Creating a comparable expression library manually would require weeks or months of modeling and sculpting work. With facial capture, your team receives a professional-quality system in a fraction of the time, allowing them to focus on implementing the animations rather than creating them from scratch.
Scalable for Your Roster
Need facial animation for multiple characters? We offer package pricing for games with larger character rosters. The per-character cost decreases as you add more characters to your project.
3 characters: $21,000 (save $2,100)
5 characters: $33,500 (save $5,000)
The facial animation system becomes a reusable asset. It can serve multiple projects, be adapted for sequels, or provide the foundation for future character development. The investment continues providing value across your studio's development cycle.
Why Facial Capture Creates Impact
Facial capture works because it records the complex coordination of facial muscles that creates genuine expression. When a person smiles authentically, dozens of muscles activate in a specific sequence and pattern. This natural coordination is what makes expressions feel real rather than artificial.
Our capture system tracks these movements at high resolution, recording not just the major facial features but the subtle details that convey nuance. The slight asymmetry in a smile, the way eyes narrow differently during various emotions, the micro-movements that precede full expressions—all these details contribute to believable character emotion.
How Results Develop:
Immediate Expressiveness
The first time you see facial animation on your character, the difference in personality and emotional presence is striking. Characters feel more alive and engaging.
Creative Exploration
With a comprehensive library, your animators can experiment with emotional moments, finding the perfect expression for each story beat or gameplay situation.
Player Connection
When players experience your game, they respond to characters who show emotion. This connection enhances investment in the story and attachment to the characters.
Production Efficiency
Your animation team works more efficiently with a complete system. Instead of creating expressions from scratch, they combine and adjust existing blend shapes to create exactly what each scene needs.
We've been developing facial capture systems for game characters since the technology became viable for real-time applications. This experience means we understand how to balance expression quality with performance requirements—creating systems that look great while running efficiently in game engines.
Records subtle facial movements and micro-expressions
Comprehensive range covering all emotional needs
Blend shapes optimized for game engine efficiency
The blend shape systems we create are designed for flexibility. Animators can blend multiple shapes together to create custom expressions, adjust intensities for subtle variations, and combine facial animation with body language for complete emotional communication. The system supports both hand-animated sequences and procedural blending systems.
For games that want even more advanced capabilities, we can set up real-time facial tracking systems that allow characters to respond dynamically to gameplay events. This creates opportunities for emergent emotional responses that enhance immersion and replayability.
Moving Forward with Assurance
We want you to feel completely confident that facial capture is the right choice for bringing emotional depth to your characters. That means transparency, collaboration, and support throughout the entire process.
Character Compatibility Review
Before starting, we review your character models to ensure facial capture will work well with your designs. You'll know upfront if any adjustments are needed.
Progressive Delivery
You receive expression previews throughout processing. This lets you provide feedback and request adjustments before the complete system is finalized.
Expression Refinement
If blend shapes need adjustment after delivery, we refine them until they work correctly on your character. We're committed to delivering a system that meets your standards.
Implementation Guidance
Our team provides hands-on support for integrating the facial system into your game. We help troubleshoot technical issues and ensure smooth implementation.
Expression Quality Promise
If the facial animation system doesn't provide the expressive range and quality you need, we'll work with you to capture additional expressions or refine existing ones—at no additional charge. Your satisfaction with the emotional capabilities of your characters is our priority.
Many developers continue working with us as they add characters to their games or begin new projects. We maintain your capture setups and processing pipelines, making future facial animation work even more efficient. You're building a relationship with a team that understands your creative vision and technical requirements.
Beginning Your Facial Animation Journey
Getting started with facial capture at Motion Lab follows a clear path designed to make the process smooth and productive:
Initial Consultation
Reach out to discuss your characters and emotional needs. Share character models if available, along with information about your game's style and the types of expressions you envision.
System Planning
We'll create an expression list tailored to your game's needs. Whether you need realistic emotions or stylized expressions, we plan capture that serves your creative direction.
Capture and Processing
We conduct the facial capture session and begin processing into blend shapes. You'll receive preview expressions to evaluate while we complete the full library.
Integration and Launch
Receive your complete facial animation system with documentation and support. We help your team integrate the system and start creating expressive character moments.
Exploring Possibilities?
Not quite ready to commit? That's perfectly fine. Many developers spend time planning their character animation approach before moving forward. Contact us to discuss possibilities, ask questions, or learn more about how facial capture might benefit your specific project.
There's no pressure or complicated process—just an opportunity to give your characters the emotional depth that helps players connect with your game. When you're ready to explore facial animation, we're here to make it happen smoothly.
Give Your Characters Emotional Life
Let's discuss how facial capture can add expressive depth to your characters, creating emotional moments that resonate with players and enhance your game's impact.
Begin the ConversationOr reach us at +1 (818) 573-9264
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