I loved the setting and scenario in their previous effort, Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, but despite claims to the contrary the narrative methods used were a step backward 20 years, being more something akin to Dragon’s Lair. Nevertheless, some pretty impressive numbers here:

Your partner at Quantic Dream, Guillaume de Fondaumière, has said that this is the biggest motion-capture project attempted in a game to date – what are the implications of this from a development perspective?

We bought our in-house mo-cap system in 2000 and we’ve had a full-time team working with it since then. We developed proprietary technologies, tools and pipelines to produce high-quality data in a very limited time frame. Heavy Rain was more than 170 days of shooting with more than 70 actors and stuntmen, plus 60 days and 50 actors for facial animations. We recreated most props on the set to allow actors to know what’s around them and to have the right contacts with their environments.

[via Edge Magazine]

Despite a clearly phoned-in voice over, Fox News’ Gamers Weekly has posted a video highlighting Resident Evil 5’s use of a Virtual Camera in the production of its cutscenes. This technique has intrigued me for some time, though equally interesting was the section showing the realtime feedback on the fully skinned and textured ingame characters. While it appears to be diffuse-only, this looks to be a small yet significant improvement.

[via Kotaku]

Had this sent to me at work today – class.

I’m pretty sure this was how game mocap, (or at least game voice-over), used to get done. In all seriousness though, there is something to be said for directing actors to do something other than the actual action to recieve your desired results.

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.

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At two months after the conference I’m a little late in posting my notes from the various lectures due to work commitments and the recent site overhaul, but now they’ll be forthcoming.

As an extra little teaser, there will soon be something new coming to Game Anim of interest to videogame animators everywhere over the next few weeks. So on with the notes…

Naughty Dog: Uncharted Animation – An In-depth Look at the Character Animation Workflow and Pipeline

Jeremy Lai-Yates & Judd Simantov – In-Game Animation Lead & Lead Character TD

After a fantastic opening to GDC with Ken Levine’s inciteful speech on Storytelling in Bioshock, this, my second lecture, turned out to be not quite all that I’d hoped for. I was really expecting to gain insight into their facial animation setup and workflow as my time spent with Drake’s Fortune have proven the cinematics to be something quite special and well-produced. However, the talk focused squarely on their mocap workflow which was a fairly standard 3-skeleton setup. 1 animation, 1 game, and 1 mocap – snapping poses and animations between them.

What confused those present most was, on deciding against employing Motionbuilder as part of their process due to their exporter being Maya-based, they proceeded to manually recreate many mocap-related features Motionbuilder provides inside Maya, (though with the notable absence of layers), rather than simply recreate their exporter inside Motionbuilder. This was reflected upon at the end with the closing statement – “We had a tendency to over-think things”.

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