Feelplus: Looking Back at LOST ODYSSEY – The Challenge of Cross Cultural Development

Ray Nakazato – President, Feelplus Inc.

As with each of the Japanese presentations, Nakazato began by detailing the hierarchy of the companies involved in the project. Feelplus Inc. was established in 2005, with the team quickly growing in size to the final headcount of around 100 developers, many of which came from Microsoft and SEGA. Feelplus is 1 of 3 companies under the AQ Interactive Group, (including Artoon and Cavia), and the project was a collaborative effort with Sakaguchi’s team at Mistwalker who formed the core desgin team.

Of interest, Feelplus found difficulty in hiring staff under the Microsoft banner. One imagines that much of the staff was populated with juniors as a result, as can happen here in the west when attempting to ramp up into production quickly. The total timeline for the project was given as:

• 8 months to prototype
• 11 months to achieve First Playable stage
• 8 months to reach Alpha

This is an incredibly short time for an RPG of Lost Odyssey’s scale despite the 100-man team size and is testament to the efficiency of their working practices. Their engine of choice was Unreal3, which may have expedited some of the risk associated with building a brand new studio but I know only too well how difficult it is to shoehorn an RPG and all the unique systems it requires into an engine built primarily for shooting games. As such, their experience was all-too-familiar, with integrations of new engine builds often holding up production, taking 3 people 6 weeks for each integration.

Nevertheless, the in-game animation production actually went quite well:

In-game Animation:

• At peak production, there were 20 ingame animators, with Animation falling under the charge of the Art Directors.
• A “Setup Group” was employed to integrate animations into the game.
• Characters and creatures were done on time.

However, the cutscene production provided several challenges due to the sheer quantity and variable quality as a direct result:

Cutscenes – What went right:

• The cutscene Visual Director came from the movie industry, bringing with him a wealth of experience.
• Facial expressions were keyframe-animated as the automated method (presumably via the Unreal-integrated FaceFX) proved too low quality. Nakazato was especially proud of the pupil movement.
• Events were of high story-written quality.

Cutscenes – What went wrong:

• Battle, Adventure and Cutscene systems and scenarios were developed seperately.
• Too much time was spent creating locations that were passed through swiftly, therefore negating the effort put into them.
• Over 300 cutscenes were required, with 4 different quality levels:
  1. FMV (Full Motion Video) Event – Pre-rendered cinematics.
  2. A Event – In-game, with keyframed facial animation and specifically recorder Motion-Capture.
  3. B Event – Off-the-shelf mocap.
  4. Scripted Events – Purely in-game.

• Looking back, FMV and A Events used same assets, so there was an unusual inconsistency despite using all the same models.
• Users were confused over inconsistent quality as they were not aware of what was an A or B in-game cutscene.

I’m sure many players are aware of the visual disparity when mixing up pre-rendered and in-game cinematic cutscenes. Even if they use the exact same models the difference in lighting, texture resolution or even full-screen effects like motion-blur become immediately apparent. It cannot be denied though that pre-rendered cinematics, by their very pre-made nature, are much more stable and easy to integrate into a game. Not much can go wrong with simply playing a video, plus you can render out at a much lower framerate and therefore throw in more characters and visual effects into a single scene that would otherwise slow down the engine, but something like visually customisable characters can prohibit their use entirely.

Nakazato said of this incosistency, “So we did two different methods, but we ended up that the players didn’t know which one is A event and which one is B event, so they just felt that the quality of the entire movies are inconsistent. That’s what we are regretting at this point.” However it’s not all bad, with the game’s opening sporting one of the most seamless transistions from pre-rendered cutscene to in-game action since Final Fantasy VII and the original Abe’s Odyssey, which you can see below – (skip to around the 3-minute mark if you’re the impatient type).

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

The first portion of the talk involved simply tallying the vast amounts of data, equipment and effort used in the production:

• 260 Vicon MX40 cameras were used synchronously to record motion.
• Body, facial and hand motion were captured simultaneously.
• An Electro Oculograph (EOG) was used to record eye-tracking.
• 20 actors could be captured simultaneously.
• Actions were captured in a 55x55x25ft volume.
• 81 actors were tracked over the course of the movie.
• 4 horses.
• 1 pony. (Only one?!)
• 46 days of shooting.
• 250 props made and captured.

The second portion detailed the methods required to bring the faces to “life”. It must be said that, despite often firmly entrenched in the Uncanny Valley as is always the case with attempts to simulate realistic facial motion, Beowulf has done the best job yet at providing real glimpses of coming up the other side. The tallies continue:

• 4 layers of face rigs.
• 3D facial models did not match actors faces in a 1:1 ratio, (Ray Winstone in particular), causing lots of marker-swapping.
• Adhered to FACS (Facial Action Coding System), to recreate all the muscles of a human face, totalling around 60 facial expressions (including head motions), with 16 different phoneme shapes.
• Face poses were created from combinations of weights of a smaller set of basic poses.
• Motion-capture values were run through a script to find the closest match with the facial expressions and were replaced with blendshapes.
• The EOG recorded horizontal and vertical eye movement, saccades and blinks via and eyepack on back with electrodes by the eyes to detect eye-muscle movements.

It should be noted that, while in my opinion the face of Angelina Jolie was the most successful and consistent in quality throughout all shots involved, Halvadar explained that hers was the scan that was deliberately adjusted the most to form an exaggerated impression of how we picture her, backing up my belief that realism is simply just not realistic enough when it comes to artistic endeavours such as this. This was also apparent in the scene of her naked, gold-dripping body emerging from the water – something which he felt the need to show several times over and was also manipulated drastically due to her pregnancy at the time of shooting.

In closing, it was most interesting of all that Halvadar’s decision to show each scene step-by-step revealed that every shot only achieved the final visual quality after a final pass was made by an animator working with video reference of the original scene, begging the questions as to why go to the bother of all the technicality when that process could be done from scratch with presumably similar results.

If absolute realism in games still is your thing, then you may wish to investigate the work of George Borshukov at EA and his Universal Capture (UCap) method. Proven in The Matrix trilogy and Tiger Woods tech demos this really is something to watch, especially since its optimisation for real-time implementation.