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Our team is purchasing a Maya Entertainment Creation Suite license, which of course includes Maya and MotionBuilder. But we're debating whether or not to get the suit version that also includes Softimage, mainly for its Face Robot package.

Can anyone give a recommendation, or at least advise how this might be used with ARENA Expression? If we have both Maya and MotionBuilder, does Face Robot really add that much value, or save that much effort? For example, does it significantly ease the facial rigging process, or have any other similar benefits? We aren't looking to do film or anything. This is for real-time games, mostly (relatively) low-resolution models.

Any advice or pros/cons would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Face Robot is very powerful, and Expression is designed to work hand in hand with it. Though from what I've seen, FR has a steep learning curve. It's strength is in its soft-tissue solver, which can produce very realistic results. But rigging your character takes quite a bit of dedication.

More specific to your situation--FR is really for high-poly characters, and it's not a real-time friendly package. I know they released a "game" pipeline for it, but game devs that I've spoken to still primarily feel like their poly budget can't make use of what FR is all about.

You should be really well set up with MoBu + Maya.

Thanks for the feedback!