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.

While what we’re doing is very segmented – the final look comes in the final moments, and you get impatient – in building a videogame, it’s more of a gradual thing. In games, you’re layering it consistently; so by the time you’ve got your engine running really well, even for the person who’s working on low-level stuff, everything looks great.

And on this side, we’re still trapped in this universe that requires such things as massive rendering times, which makes it impossible for us. The better it looks, the heavier it is; for us to change the movement of this character, we have to backtrack and change all these other elements. Whereas on the game, they could look at something on the screen – a door handle, say – and change that doorknob to make it look beautiful. For us, it gets heavier the better it looks. There was a moment I was watching what they were doing and I thought, “I want to do videogames!” Because they’re building this thing – and once it’s in working form, they’re working in real time on beautiful stuff, all within the engine.

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.