Body Worlds 2

On Sunday, I finally got around to visiting the fantastic Body Worlds 2 exhibit down at the Montreal Science Centre.

Body Worlds 2

Despite being an amazing opportunity to dispell many taboos about death and the physical workings of the human body, as well as being the best anti-smoking advert ever, there were a few things pertaining to animation. The first, despite spending the last 2 years animating an actual scanned human body, I’d never realised that a person’s armspan is generally equal to the length of their entire body – illustrated by a literal overlay of two perpendicular slices from the same person. Secondly, that we REALLY need to begin looking into real-time muscle deformation on our characters if we wish to add a further level of realism to our game characters that had been overcome long ago circa the first Shrek movie.

Admittedly, I can’t see a use for this level of detail in most games, my next project being part of that crowd, but surely 1-on-1 fighting games such as Tekken and Virtua Fighter would be places to gain the most bang-for-buck?