It is my personal guess that this decision was simply based on hard economic truths, not on a desire of a quick cash-in. Thibault Weise (one of the founders of FaceShift) personally at WMC In Bacelona Spain earlier this year, and he came across as a very passionate individual about bringing mocap tech down to an affordable level for every creator. By the way that's a very mean assumption, I've had the privilege of meeting Mr. My personal belief is FacePlus being discontinued and FaceShift being discontinued have nothing to do with lack of passion by their dev teams. Otherwise the effort is simply not financially sustainable. Unless the providers dial up that price to levels comparable Autodesk products, a way needs to be found to license that tech to the large public and have a revenue stream from that, or to partner with a large company who can somehow do that for them.

Tech research grants can help for a while, but they will dry up at some point. The amount of tech and research that goes in it is done by engineers and scientists that typically demand (and deserve) solid paychecks. Unless the tech providers start charging a lot of money for their professional subscription they can't typically grow or survive on that alone. Back when I worked in console game development I've been involved in a few projects where we had to externally license this kind of tech for games, so I have experience with this market from both sides of the fence. The hard truth is the professional market for this licensing kind of tech is rather small and does not scale. Who knows what the future may bring On a side (more official) note: We will try and speed up the release of the FaceRig Studio version so that it is out there at a good level of quality by the end of the year and try to fill that gap ( if that is even possible) as best we can. I'll see what Apple does with it before calling wolf though. I had hoped we could collaborate to see a FaceShift powered FaceRig available in the future, but that didn't get to happen sadly. Every time an indie initiative who has had as a mission making something more accessible to the public is bought by a larger corporate entity is not necessarily a happy day. The Aquisition I too found out about the acquisition yesterday and I was a bit disenhartened to learn about FaceShift Studio being discontinued. Our community manager found this thread yesterday and pinged me about it so here is some info mixed with some personal opinions (I am not here in an official position as much as personal, though I do have trouble separating the two sometimes ).

Hello Everyone Dragos here, one of the FaceRig founders.

Faceshift studio tutorial