Work / Character & Rigging

Destiny 2 — NPC face rigs

Joint-based faces for Destiny 2, at a budget a live game can afford.

ProblemGood faces on a small budget

Bungie wanted NPC faces that held up in cinematics, without a film-style blendshape rig on every character.

BuiltJoints that behave like blendshapes

  • Rewrote and automated the facial rigging pipeline: faces sculpted as poses, converted to joints with linear skinning decomposition.
  • About 120 joints and fewer than 200 poses per face.
  • Rigged characters and creatures for cinematics across expansions, including Cayde-6 and Zavala.
8+Destiny 2 releases, 2016–2022
~120joints per face
< 200poses per face
Zavala face rig.
Cayde-6 death scene: damaged body and face.

Animation by Aaron Deerfield; character art by Adam Scott. The same problem, solved again in C++: mcaPoseSkinner.