Archive for the ‘Facial Animation’ Category
27.06.08 Beowulf Mocap Postmortem
It’s certainly some time after the event, (it’s slow going when you’re in the middle of a full production), but I’ve finally collated my remaining notes from this year’s Game Developers’ Conference that relate to animation and characters in games. So to start off, we have the head of R&D on last year’s landmark film featuring virtual actors, followed by a trio of Japanese developers giving insight into their approaches to animation and character development.
Sony Pictures Imageworks: A Believable Character Postmortem: Motion Capture on the Virtual Set of BEOWULF
Parag Halvadar - Lead R&D Engineer
Hailing from the same studio that created Monster House, Halvadar’s talk concentrated on facial motion as that’s a recent topic for games industry. As is often the case with movie industry approaches they couldn’t directly be recreated for use in a game development situation, but nonetheless provided an interesting insight into some of the lengths that must be gone to in search of the (some say, false) holy grail of truly photo-real virtual characters.
12.02.08 It’s In The Details
During game development, we often refer to fighting games as the best example of where real-time animation can be pushed due to the genre typically concentrating on only two characters in an enclosed arena, though unfortunately most often in terms of “We can’t do that - we’re not making a fighter…”.
As noted on the previous movies, these recent screens of SFIV point towards some pretty animation-intensive details, sporting bone scaling, cloth and an impressive detailed facial setup, as well as what must be some form of muscle deformation to maintain volume in the limbs. On top of all this is a look-at system between not only the two main protagonists but also the crowd of onlookers - something that will become standard in the near future to overcome the lifeless gaze of previous-generation videogame characters.
11.10.07 Morph Management
Another small post, this time on a different approach to morph-target lip-sync.
Di-O-Matic: Efficient methods for creating lip-sync blend shapes
Laurent Abucassis - Founder: Di-O-Matic
A considerably lower-key affair than Halon’s, this talk revolved around a demonstration on how to make phonetic mouth-shapes for lip-sync via blend-shapes (or morphing), something that, while offering more control over mesh deformation than simple bone positions, can be quite a pain to actually create and maintain the multitude of models required to create a blend-shape list.
While it did turn into something of a product pitch towards the end, the educational portion of the talk began with pointing out the first mistake most animators make when creating lip-sync for the first time, whereby they try to for shapes for every letter. However as Laurent said, “A letter is not a sound”.