On Sunday, I finally got around to visiting the fantastic Body Worlds 2 exhibit down at the Montreal Science Centre.
Despite being an amazing opportunity to dispell many taboos about death and the physical workings of the human body, as well as being the best anti-smoking advert ever, there were a few things pertaining to animation. The first, despite spending the last 2 years animating an actual scanned human body, I’d never realised that a person’s armspan is generally equal to the length of their entire body – illustrated by a literal overlay of two perpendicular slices from the same person. Secondly, that we REALLY need to begin looking into real-time muscle deformation on our characters if we wish to add a further level of realism to our game characters that had been overcome long ago circa the first Shrek movie.
Admittedly, I can’t see a use for this level of detail in most games, my next project being part of that crowd, but surely 1-on-1 fighting games such as Tekken and Virtua Fighter would be places to gain the most bang-for-buck?