More Metal Gear Details

At the risk of coming across as a fanboy, here is a second dose of Metal Gear 4 details divulged on the net. It appears that the Kojima Productions team did the rounds quite a bit post-release as it includes yet more images and information on the making of Metal Gear 4.

The image to the side shows the skeleton used for main protagonist Snake, revealing the inclusion of deformation bones to maintain volume on the elbows, knees and wrists on top of the now-standard twist bones for the shoulders, hips and wrists. Unidentifiable, however, are the curious bones at the neck – perhaps to aid shoulder deformation or simply to attach weapons to?

Some stats from the article:

  • 115 bones in total, comprising:
  • 36 in the face.
  • 47 in the body.
  • 32 in the hands, (3 for each finger, with an additional bone on each hand between the thumb and index finger – presumably to maintain volume).
  • 1700 animations, over MGS3’s 1200.
  • 1400 polygons, up from MGS3’s 4400.
  • 5MB of textures, with a 512×512 for the face and 1024×1024 for the body.

Additionally, a higher-res screenshot of the FaceManager facial animation sliders allow us to peer deeper into the variables used to bring their fantastic characters to life. Here’s the modest list of facial expressions to accompany their similarly conservative facial bone-count:

  • Nose_Up
  • Open_Jaw L/R
  • Smile L/R
  • Anger L/R
  • Kiss L/R
  • Frown L/R
  • Extra_A L/R
  • Extra_B L/R

One imagines the last two to be unique to each character, and there are clearly additional tabs for Phonemes, Eyes and Wrinkles.