Because our “Complete Characters” library (released in 2005) has been the most popular of our libraries, we decided to start working on a new generation of prefab characters in 2009.

Although the original “Complete Characters” were still selling well, the continuous improvement of hardware and graphics engines allowed for higher detailed meshes and textures as well as for more sophisticated animation and rigging. Therefore our main goal for the next generation of animated 3D models named “Complete Characters HD” was to use this potential for the creation of even more believable and realistic virtual humans. But still it was very important for us to maintain a standardized system in which all the characters would fit in.

A facial animation rig was one of the features not available in any other stock model collection on the market, although it is a crucial one for lifelike and believable animated characters. The challenge was to give our customers the possibility to use each of the 500+ animations from the new library with every single character, without needing to adjust it to the different characters. Luckily we were able to develop smart solutions for making this possible, while still maintaining a broad variety of different virtual characters across the whole series.

We also decided to make life easier for our customers by creating presets for many facial expressions and phonemes. These can be used with many facial animation middleware solutions and plug-ins that generate automated facial animation by interpreting sound files.

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We recorded the large library of animations for “Complete Characters HD” with our motion capture system to make the moves look as lifelike as possible. Lots of editing was done to the mocap data, again for the sake of easy usability on the customer’s side. Everybody that has worked with stock motion data from other vendors knows how painful the process can be, when making the transition between two animations look good when being used successively. So we standardized the poses to be the same for the first frame of almost all animations - this way we could make different animations fit seamlessly to each other when connected in series.

In autumn 2010 the first set of 42 different western style civilians was released. Since then we continue to expand the “Complete Characters HD” series with more and more special characters until today – for example Middle East characters or people clothed in work wear and uniforms of various types. We release new characters for this series regularly and will add more and more different characters in the future.