Epic Games got a company that was responsible for God of War’s or Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice’s animation technology.
Epic Games acquired Cubic Motion. They created facial animation technology that is used in conjunction with facial rigs used for animations to make subtle facial expressions to have more human, natural expressions. Epic Games wants to include it in its toolset for the developers that use Unreal Engine for their games.
„Facial animation that conveys the slightest nuance of human expression is essential to crossing the uncanny valley. We believe that holistically combining Epic’s Unreal Engine with 3Lateral’s facial rig creation and Cubic Motion’s solving technology is the only way to answer this challenge, and ultimately, to reach the pinnacle of digital human artistry with Unreal Engine,” Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri said in a statement to GamesIndustry.biz.
Every Cubic Motion employees will retain their jobs, and Epic Games also promised to work on the company’s partners on the projects they have been working on before the acquisition, meaning that it is a transitional period for the technology before it goes proprietary.
Epic Games Store has three games for free at the moment – they are Anodyne 2: Return to Dust, A Short Hike, and Mutazione. They are smaller games, which is why we get not one or two as usual but three titles. However, the next week will have two bigger titles. One of them will be Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs from 2014. The other game will be The Stanley Parable. The games will be freebies for a week starting March 19.
So Epic is giving it all – they don’t just give freebies via the Epic Games Store, they also want to improve Unreal Engine as much as possible. Tim Sweeney doesn’t give up.
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