Still with Capcom’s fighter, the more I play it the more I realise the actual animation is merely “functional”, but I imagine that’s what is required to ship a reboot of a franchise where every animation is subject to timing changes for game balancing throughout the project. What appeals most about this visuals are the incredibly solid models and their accompanying rigging and facial poses, so it’s nice to see that the Japanese Softimage site has a page up regarding both these aspects, (with a link to another page demonstrating Resident Evil 5’s volume-retaining arm rig too). Check it out here.

Via the Google translation I see that the game has 25 characters of around 16,000 polygons each, comprising some 5000 animations. The rigging videos are of most interest however, highlighting both their facial & finger sliders and the unique controls for Dhalsim’s squash and stretch limbs. In a break from what I’m used to , the team take a less modular approach to facial expressions, with broad sliders for various facial expressions as opposed to sliders for each area of the face which can afford greater control for the animator but proves more time consuming and being prone to going off-model. This might be a viable approach with such stylised characters however, and they control the following variables:

Read entire post…

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.

I’ve been feeling for some time now that Japanese developers have been falling behind their western counterparts in the technology side of game development, so it’s always good to hear that the Metal Gear Solid team still stand up as a cutting-edge developer – even more so when you learn this via a huge drop of “behind-the-scenes” images from one of the largest games to be released this year.

A few weeks back, details of the facial animation rig and other workflow info had been posted on the Japanese XSI website and I was planning to extract information via the google tranlation and observation alone, but someone beat me to it, (and managed to do a much better job than I would ever have). Head on over to Chris Evans’ (Tech-Art Lead at Crytek) blog for full translations of the following sections:

• MGS4 Facial Animation
• MGS4 Character Pipeline
• MGS4 Cluster Constraint Setup

Regarding the  facial setup, it looks very reminiscent of the same method I saw presented at ADAPT 2007 by Aaron Holly of Disney. This involved a similar setup of a bone rig driven by a mesh giving the two following important advantages.

1. It was highly flexible and able to be moved between multiple similar faces as the animation is stored on a nurbs mesh that drives the bones rather than the bones directly, therefore allowing for varying bone positions.
2. If using a pose-based facial animation solution such as FaceFX, the bones travel along the curve of a nurbs surface rather than a simple linear translation, therefore better mimicking the movement of skin across the skull.

This is certainly something I’d be keen to try in the near future given that it now appears to have successfully been put through a full videogame production.

This, the final talk I’ll post from GDC’08, centred on the development of the first company-wide technology platform (or engine) for Square Enix. Despite the heavy tech-focus, this was the largest lineup I attended at the conference due to the chance of gleaning any information from these Japanese RPG masters.

Square Enix: The Technology of FINAL FANTASY

Taku Murata – General Manager, Technical Research Division

Traditionally, a new platform was created for each title, with the game first made in Japanese and translations following much later. This looks set to change with the latest upcoming releases which will be very exciting to many western fans, and the target platforms (for the engine) are PS3, PC and XBOX360.

Murata’s history reads like something of a chronology of technological breakthroughs in Japanese game development, with much of his work driven by animation – in particular facial animation. Of interest most of all was the admission that several of the driving forces for this new engine centred on displaying characters’ faces to a very high fidelity in close-up.

Read entire post…

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.

Read entire post…