Colin Urquhart Features in MVC as this month’s “Final Boss” Feature

Our co-founder Colin Urquart recently sat down with MCV/Develop to be interviewed as part of their ongoing “Final Boss” feature. The column, which each month features a leading industry player in the video game industry, invites the interviewee to share insights from their specific field and note current trends in the world of video games. 

Colin shared his thoughts on his three decades of innovation in the fields of facial capture and animation. He highlighted DI4D’s 20th anniversary, and our work on a diverse range of projects including Blade Runner 2049; Love, Death and Robots and Quantum Break. 

Colin cited one of DI4D’s earliest projects, capturing the facial performance of actor Vincent Cassel for the 2014 French-language version of Beauty and the Beast, as key in helping shape DI4D’s guiding principle of recognising the value of good acting performance and reproducing that as faithfully as possible onto a digital character.

Colin lists the company’s most outstanding achievement to date as processing all facial performance data for Activision’s new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. The game was released in October 2022 to universal acclaim, with critics praising it for “featuring some of the most lifelike facial motion capture that the gaming industry has seen to date.” – Dot Esports. 

You can find out more about our work on Call of Duty here.

Finally, Colin cast his mind to the future, considering the gaming industry’s biggest upcoming challenges. He asserts that, as the graphical power of gaming hardware continues to increase exponentially, so will the need for content with ever higher fidelity and realism. In order to meet  this need, 3D capture of the real world in all of its natural detail will be increasingly preferred to artistic processes, and the use of solutions such as PURE4D to capture accurate facial performance will become increasingly necessary. 

Ultimately, Colin’s interview was a chance to reflect and look to the future. It was an opportunity to highlight DI4D’s past and present successes and share some of our insights into the video game industry. 

Sound interesting? You can read Colin’s full “Final Boss” interview here.

Want to know more about DI4D’s 20 years of experience? You can find out more on our website.