Digital Media World: Masquerade 2.0 Makes Characters More Human

Digital Domain Teaches Digital Characters How to be More Human

October 12, 2020

In September, Digital Domain announced that Masquerade 2.0, the next version of its in-house facial capture system, is now ready for Digital Domain to use in client projects as part of their asset creation process.

The software has been redesigned to make it practical to build and animate feature film-quality characters for games, TV programming and commercials. The same techniques and systems used to create Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War can now be applied to short form projects and bring the fine details and emotion of an actor’s performance to home and mobile screens.

Unlike methods that need long development stages to complete, Masquerade 2.0 can deliver a photorealistic 3D character and many hours of performance, in a few months. Using machine learning, Masquerade has now been trained to accurately capture expressive details without limiting an actor’s movement on-set. This freedom has helped Digital Domain develop emotive characters for projects over several years, including major Hollywood movies, real-time TED talks and TIME Studio’s recent recreation of Dr Martin Luther King Jr.