LA Noire
http://kotaku.com/5687423/la-noire-explores-the-subtleties-of-crime-with-nuanced-digital-actors
The rendering quality isnt' all that hot but the facial animation is really impressive.
Their pipeline sounds crazy expensive though:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/29345/Interview_The_Tech_Designed_To_Give_LA_Noires_Performances_Life.php
Still, that's pretty cool.
The rendering quality isnt' all that hot but the facial animation is really impressive.
Their pipeline sounds crazy expensive though:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/29345/Interview_The_Tech_Designed_To_Give_LA_Noires_Performances_Life.php
Still, that's pretty cool.
Replies
It's amazing how similar games are becoming to films now. I felt like I was watching a movie trailer.
Not sure I can get on board with that, but it does bring up the question of whether this technique could be used with less realistic characters? And what would the result look like.
Bigjohn - I don't think this technique can be used with stylization - it appears to be similar to universal capture.
The main difference being how the face is rigged and manipulated. Which I think their system still falls short on delivering a fantastic performance and only delivers a "better" performance than what has come before. It looks to lean a little too heavily on tech and if they hired some animators from the 3D feature film world they could do a better job jumping the valley.
The animators he talks to, probably don't like it, because they never do enough of it to get good at it, or they are forced to work with hideous rigs designed by people who don't animate faces.
Anything that pushes people to think outside of the typical bone based facial rig is great, even if Image Metrics still manages to smoke these guys, what they're doing is great more power to them.
I think between their real time cloth sims and their facial animation they're going to RROD a few systems...
On the left:
I thought that this'd look a lot better, from reading run-up preview reports. It looks great, but it doesn't look natural, still. The main guy's eyes hardly ever change throughout the video.
Can't wait to see what the next iteration of this is.
Anyway, whatever happens, it's nice to see a large and potentially successful title coming out of Australia.
Secondly, the facial animation seems... not great to me. They either lack specific eye and eyebrow controls, or just refuse to use them 90% of the time.
Overall art, art direction, editing, voice acting, and where the story looks like it'll go? Awesome.
-to vig's post: maybe they only hire people to clean up mocap, rather than actual animators.
Visuals aside, I really look forward to this game. I'm glad we're going to see more non-GTA games from Rockstar.
No, not at all. Face FX takes sound files with optional text, plus predefined face shapes on a rigged model. It analyses the audio data to get the sounds, and then uses a mapping to blend the face poses to create new poses for each key of animation.
Nothing like the Depth Analysis tech.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/29345/Interview_The_Tech_Designed_To_Give_LA_Noires_Performances_Life.php
Valve doesn't use mocap, do they?
Yes I was getting faceFX confused with these guys:
http://www.image-metrics.com/
Damn dudes, mad props!! This stuff is amazing - great advancement. I wonder how well it could go with a really heavy modified face, or what about an animatronic alien / creature. Would be freaking awesome - the mind boggles.
1. They have to shoot the body animation and then facial animation at different times. It seems impossible to get a really solid performance that way. The head and the body are connected in how they move, all the time. What you say, informs how you move your head, and how you move your head affects your body.
2. They had preview shots of just a 3d head speaking in a few scenes. Didn't it look way way more expressive than anything in game?
Rooster - hats used to be huge back in the day.
Yeah, now that you mention it, lol. The crown is just waay wider than the head, looks like it goes half an inch out from the head all the way around..
EDIT:
Comparison:
If you look at the scene towards the end where he's interviewing the woman, her face is lit a bit brighter than the rest of the scene and the skin tones don't look natural. It also seems like everything is like a streaming texture animation in unreal or something. A little bit cloudy, and they seem to have optimized the mocap so things don't seem as smooth as the tech demo video.
It's a neat technology, but even this seems to have some rough areas. Call me old fashion, but I've always felt that having facial mocap transferred to cleanly designed facial rigs gives a better result.
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=498627717023&oid=51752540096&comments
dunno how to share the video only... but this is just getting better and better. I like the idea of interrogation and trying to figure out the truth in the cases. Definitely a game i am looking forward to!
Motion tech looks awesome. If I squinted my eyes it looked like real people. What lets it down is the skin or lighting on the skin. Basically looks flatshaded.
will be keeping my eye on this for sure.
I agree with the way the characters look flat shaded kinda. But hey.. they still have some time.. and red dead and GTAIV had really good lighting. But i am impressed on the gameplay aspect and i just wanna check it out and see if it's something that will blow my mind and keep me intrigued, or something like Mafia II were everything is really pretty but that is it. What do you guys think?
Don't forget that this isn't a game developed by Rockstar and isn't running on their tech. You're not going to see the sophisticated lighting and environmental effects from the likes of Red Dead Redemption.
I remember Source using some kind of ray tracing algorithm for the eyes only to give them that realistic shine.
In these trailers from LA Noire, the eyes barely seem to move and look.. completely dead.
I'm still getting the game but I can't be the only one who's noticing this :P
the highlights is not the main thing that makes the face feel alive, the motion is, and it's damn good
I'm sure they'll overcome this rendering issues in the future projects. Would fucking love to see this tech in GTA5. But right now it's good enough for me to buy this game.