Expressive Character Facial Animations, Fast

In animation, every frame is important to breathe life and into characters.  From the beginning of animation with hand-drawn facial expressions to today’s automatic AI-powered CG animation solutions, what remains unchanged is that nuanced facial animations especially stands out as a crucial component of emotion in storytelling. Aquifer makes it easy to animate your brand's character in minutes. With our AI-powered system, you can create with automated animation and make selective adjustments for the perfect scene.

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Professional stylized animation made simple

Solutions for fast, efficient facial animation often mimic human movement. But stylized characters often don't resemble humans and need a different approach. Stylized characters’ shapes, and movement are unique to to the geometry of that character design. That's why professional animators use professional animation software such as Maya, Toon Boom, Adobe Animate, Unity and more to bring life and expression to stylized characters' eyes, lip sync, and facial muscles in each frame. With Aquifer, anyone on your content team can create professional, stylized animation for your character.

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Creating expressive faces with Aquifer

Depending on the stylized character concept & design, lip sync should look different. During Aquifer's brand onboarding process, a unique style profile is generated for each character. During the animation process, profile automatically informs every facial muscle movement and shape.

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1. Generate lip sync from audio

Simply upload a WAV file with the voiceover audio you want your character to lip sync to and in under 3 seconds you'll get perfect lip sync.

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2. Get on-brand results every time

Whether your character has a smooth movements, snappy-style, toothy grin, or even a beak, Aquifer's proprietary style profile ensures accurate shapes, phonemes, and animation style every time.

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3. Build emotions with expressions & modifiers

For each character, Aquifer offers a custom set of Expressions and Modifiers generated with your brand's unique style profile. Each of these buildable and adjustable blocks dynamically layer into the animation for seamless emotional expressions.

Expressions - Expressions are dynamic emotional building blocks that give your character a natural-looking underlying "mood" though out the animation. Expressions available to each character vary based on pricing tier, but you can try out a set in the Sprinkle Example Kit, including Awe, Confused, Delight, Devious, Happy, Sad

Modifiers - Modifiers are emotion and expression amplifiers. They are blocks of facial movements that give your character crucial emotional highlights at important points in the scene. Modifers available to each character vary based on pricing tier, but you can try out 30+ Modifiers in Sprinkle Example Kit, including Blink, Eyebrows Up, Look Up/Down/Left/Right, Smirk, Eyes Wide, Eyebrow Furrrow, Squint, and much more!

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4. Export and Publish

Once your scene is exactly the way you want it, select your aspect ratio: widescreen 16:9, vertical 9:16, square 1:1, select export video settings, and export. In a few minutes, your completed video will be available on the Aquifer dashboard for preview and download. Enjoy!
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