Epic Games to provide Unreal Engine 3 licensees industry-leading facial animation software
Raleigh, North Carolina - October 18th, 2005 - Epic Games, world leading developers of cutting-edge computer and video games and the pioneer of the award-winning Unreal® Engine, and OC3 Entertainment, a leading provider of facial animation technology, announced today that OC3 Entertainment’s FaceFX™ product has been licensed for use in Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3. The agreement means that the FaceFX technology will be available to all Unreal Engine 3 licensees. Epic Games will use the FaceFX product in their upcoming titles Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 2007 to create emotive characters and cinematic-quality dialogue sequences.
“OC3 Entertainment is thrilled to continue working with Epic Games and further solidify our partnership,” said Jamie Redmond, Co-founder and Technical Director of OC3 Entertainment. “Unreal Engine 3 with an integrated version of FaceFX makes for a very powerful next-generation facial animation solution with enormous potential and we are very excited to see what the talented teams using Unreal Engine 3 can produce.”
“Facial animation is of paramount importance to Epic Games and our licensees for the next generation,” said Mark Rein, Vice President and Co-founder of Epic Games. “FaceFX is truly in a league of its own. We are thrilled to be using it in our own development, and we are confident that Unreal Engine licensees will greatly benefit from our relationship with OC3 Entertainment.”
For More Information Contact:
Nicola Kirby
Little Brown Dog for Epic Games
+44 (0) 1372 818 776
kirby@littlebrowndoggy.com
Doug Perkowski
OC3 Entertainment, Inc.
(919) 767-0626
info@oc3ent.com
About FaceFX
FaceFX is an advanced facial animation solution unique in its ability to liberate artists from the complexities of creating realistic dialogue and emotive characters. The nuances of facial movement can be stored as interactions between morph targets, bone poses, and material properties using the ground-breaking Face Graph™ technology. FaceFX can be used to animate characters by hand or generate lip-synchronization and speech gesture data automatically from audio dialogue. FaceFX uses industry leading VoiceIn® speech recognition technology from Fonix to perfectly synchronize the audio to the mouth movements.
About OC3 Entertainment
OC3 Entertainment (www.oc3ent.com) is a private company dedicated to powering the gaming industry with realistic talking characters. The company develops FaceFX, a middleware solution for game developers.
About Unreal Engine 3
The award-winning Unreal Engine is known for cutting-edge graphics and a best-of-breed toolset. Unreal Engine 3 is expected to maintain those features while adding massive world support, multi-processor support, next-generation console optimizations, and one of the most mature tool pipelines in the industry. Unreal Engine 3’s new toolset is designed specifically to accelerate developers' productivity for ultra-complex, next-generation content. Additional information on Unreal Engine can be obtained at www.unrealtechnology.com.
About Epic Games
Epic Games Inc., based in Raleigh, NC and established in 1991, is a developer of cutting-edge computer and video games. The company is best known as the creator of hit PC 3D action games Unreal and Unreal Tournament, both award-winning blockbuster hits having each sold more than one million copies. Epic is also responsible for the Unreal Engine, which is the underlying technology for a wide range of games including, 2002 Console Game of the Year winner, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell ™ from Ubi Soft; PC Gamer’s 2000 Game of the Year, Deus Ex from Ion Storm/Eidos; America's Army: Special Forces , from the United States Army, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (PC) from Electronic Arts. Additional information can be obtained through Epic's Web site at www.epicgames.com.
Unreal is a registered trademark of Epic Games Inc. FaceFX is a trademark of OC3 Entertainment Inc. VoiceIn is a registered trademark of Fonix. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies.