Epic Games has acquired a long-time technology partner called Cubic Motion. The subject of the acquisition is well known for its automated performance-driven facial animation technology, as featured in HEXUS news previously. Below you can see various animated faces powered by the Unreal Engine which debuted in recent years.
Epic's synergistic strategy of bringing Cubic Motion onboard is further enhanced by 3Lateral, a developer of innovative technologies that enable digitization of human appearance and motion at unprecedented levels of realism, which it added to the Unreal Engine team in January 2019.
Tim Sweeney, Epic Games founder and CEO, talked about how complex it is to create realistic digital humans, calling the task "the next frontier of content creation". With the acquisition of Cubic Motion and the 3Lateral team already in house, Sweeney believes the Unreal Engine can help 'democratise' this graphical expertise and animation technology.
The most recent example video of Unreal Engine, 3Lateral, and Cubic Motion tech working together is the Siren video from GDC 2018. Below you can see the official 'Siren' video featuring a high-fidelity, real-time digital character based on the likeness of Chinese actress Bingjie Jiang. China's Tencent and the UK's Vicon also collaborated on this project.
Highlights of Cubic Motion's technology usage in video games include its role in Sony Interactive Entertainment's God of War and Insomniac Games' Marvel's Spider-Man.
Epic didn't divulge how much it paid to acquire Cubic Motion.
Epic Games Store giveaways continue
While on the topic of Epic Games, its store currently has three games available for free, and you can see the next pair of giveaways. You can see the games available and coming soon in the screenshot below.
