Game Anim » softimage

Street Fighter IV Facial Controls

Jonathan — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:39:43 +0000

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 toÂ , 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:

DEFAULT_UPPER_PARTS
- DEFAULT
DEFAULT_LOWER_PARTS
- DEFAULT
SPK_LOWER_PARTS
- SPK_A_ACCENT
- SPK_A
- SPK_E_ACCENT
- SPK_E
- SPK_I_ACCENT
- SPK_I
- SPK_N_ACCENT
- SPK_N
- SPK_O_ACCENT
- SPK_O
- SPK_U_ACCENT
- SPK_U
BHV_UPPER_PARTS
- BHV_BLINK
EMO_UPPER_PARTS
- EMO_ANGER
- EMO_ATTACK_ACCENT
- EMO_ATTACK
- EMO_AWAKENING
- EMO_CRY
- EMO_FEAR
- EMO_HATE
- EMO_JOY
- EMO_SHOUT
- EMO_SMILE
- EMO_SORROW
- EMO_SURPRISE
- EMO_TIREDNESS
EMO_LOWER_PARTS
- EMO_ANGER
- EMO_ATTACK_ACCENT
- EMO_ATTACK
- EMO_AWAKENING
- EMO_CRY
- EMO_FEAR
- EMO_HATE
- EMO_JOY
- EMO_SHOUT
- EMO_SMILE
- EMO_SORROW
- EMO_SURPRISE
- EMO_TIREDNESS

Japanese Softimage Pages Translated

Jonathan — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 04:31:02 +0000

The other week the industry awoke to the shocking news that the last bastion of competition to Autodesk’s domination of the CG market, Softimage, was finally consumed alongside the earlier aquisition of Maya. What this kind of monopoly over the CG Industry will bring to artists in the long-term is still unclear, but the minimal increase in features of the last couple of Maya iterations point to this not being a good thing.

On a positive note though, the “Customer Stories” section of the Japanese Softimage site have now been translated, so offer insights in the production of not just MGS4, but also a handful of other major Japanese games such as Capcom’s Devil May Cry 4 pictured above. Go check it out.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Facial Rig & More

Jonathan — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:40:50 +0000

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:

Regarding theÂ 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.

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.
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.