The Gman spoke in a peculiar way, but seeing the tech in action 13 years ago was very impressive. To me, at least!
In the same year we had Vampire Bloodlines. Again, for the time (and for a huge RPG) it was great to see. Lots of races, body/facial types, yet they handled it well:
3 years later we had Crysis. With almost photorealistic graphics, character models looked amazing with their lifelike features, perfect lip sync and facial expressions (start at 1:3:
Crysis has always been great with this. Crysis 3 was no exception:
Jumping back into our timeline, we hit LA Noire in 2011.
It wasn't always good, in fact, in more than a few cases, it was pretty damn creepy. But the way they achieved this was pretty impressive.
Moving on to 2013, we have Beyond: Two Souls:
Fuck me in the butthole if they didn't capture faces and expressions perfectly in that game.
In the same year we also had The last of us:
I can't really reference any scene that stands out from the others. Take your pick:
And now onto 2015 with the game that prompted me to make this topic. The Witcher 3. A massive RPG made by a Polish company with their previous game being The Witcher 2. Which, let's face it, wasn't exactly known among the gaming masses. What makes this example so special? Let's get to it!
Firstly, did you know facial animations were almost all done by hand? Me neither! Secondly, did you know there are almost 30hrs of cinematics between the base game + DLC? These two things alone blew my mind. Now for some quotes from the CDPR team:
Yes, practically all facial animations in Witcher 3 were made by hand by our amazing animators and, in some capacity, designers
Technically: AFAIK one moment in the base game did have one piece of performance data from facial capture - IIRC, part of Johnny monologue, that went either way through hands of the animator
No, the cinematic scenes in W3 were not made by algorithm and cinematic department did not "just" touch it up to look right
Yes, we do have a nifty in-engine tool that allowed to generate some data, if required: most of the time it would be the very base setup of characters (that they stand in front of each other or that there are x people in the scene), some gestures (that would end up more than anything as a placeholdery noise, absolutely customized to each and every conversation) and some facial performance (that just like everything else would be only a starting point)
No, that tool was not used everywhere and the more experienced we were, the less it was needed - expansions are the best examples of that
Even with the tool and super-powerful editor in place, we still spent months working on the cinematic content
Mocap was used for many animations in game, as it is, simply, useful - having that said, mocap is not the end of the road: it's just a tool, and the data, to be valuable, must not only be cleaned but also made "just right"
Lipsync was procedural, but still tweaked for the corner cases and specific characters
Editor for cinematic scenes was pretty amazing, the more I think about it - it would scale from the simplest merchant conversation, which could be set up ridiculously quick yet still with high base quality to gigantic, multi-minute, multi-character conversations, all with full blown facial animation pass, gestures, props, morphs, clipping tweaked per scene/shot/animation/everything we could thing of.
In the end we've delivered more than 30 hours of cinematic content in the base game
I think by now we all know how amazing that game is when it comes to... almost everything, but here are some examples regardless. Keep the above in mind:
(Notice how the hands connected and didn't miss the mark...)
Everything looks so natural and lifelike. The character animation, expressions, reactions, lip sync, camera work and models are all masterpieces.
Remember: All of this coming from devs who admittedly "had no clue how to make games" when they started out, with hardly any financial backing or resources to draw from (relative to some of the development/publishing giants out there).
And today, in 2017, we have the likes of Star Citizen with it's amazing (truly amazing, in every regard) lip sync + facial animation.
I'm sure there are a lot of honorable mentions along the way, but they stand out the most to me. Which really makes you question what the fuck some developers are doing these days, when games that are larger in scope can pull off a far better job with less experience, money and time.
@DCB
Yep, most of the games by Ninja Theory have awesome facial animations. Like Enslaved and Heavenly Sword.
I still remember playing Heavenly Sword on the X360 back then and looked like when i saw the animations.
______
@HIz
but it was a shitty game.
Enslaved on the other hand
3080, ps5, lg oled
Sin317-"im 31 years old and still surprised at how much shit comes out of my ass actually ..."
SteamDRM-"Call of Duty is the symbol of the true perfection in every aspect. Call of Duty games are like Mozart's/Beethoven's symphonies"
deadpoetic-"are you new to the cyberspace?"
Nothing beats L.A Noire, not even close. You can tell a mile away that other games uses hand made animations, they look like something that tries to look natural but just fails miserably at it. There's so many things that can go wrong with doing it by hand, i think a lot is about the speed of the animations, when the eyes moves too fast or has too few frames of animations we will notice its off immediately and think "fake".
It's so annoying that practially nothing happens in this department.
@KillerCrocker
The combat might not have been so good. But i remember i really enjoyed the cutscenes.
Me too. But I've played it years after release (HS) so I might have been late to the party
3080, ps5, lg oled
Sin317-"im 31 years old and still surprised at how much shit comes out of my ass actually ..."
SteamDRM-"Call of Duty is the symbol of the true perfection in every aspect. Call of Duty games are like Mozart's/Beethoven's symphonies"
deadpoetic-"are you new to the cyberspace?"
@vurt
I actually found the facial animations in LA Noire very bad. Just because it looked like they slapped on a video recorded face on some ingame head. Like the Annoying Orange:
@vurt
I actually found the facial animations in LA Noire very bad. Just because it looked like they slapped on a video recorded face on some ingame head. Like the Annoying Orange:
Spoiler:
There are a few instances where they might have messed something up, but for the most part it looks absolutely movie like, which it should taking into account how it's actually done. Witcher 3, Last of Us etc etc.. it's terrible in comparison, looks super fake.
If there's one thing that looks off it's the body animations which doesnt match the super realistic facial animations.
Good example of how awesome it looks here (notice the part where she gulps, for example). the whole head / neck is animated, so it has great consistency.
If there's one thing that looks off it's the body animations which doesnt match the super realistic facial animations.
That's because they had to strap the actors into a giant Clockwork Orange contraption to get that level of capture. Presumably some sort of combined whole body performance that can capture at full photorealism-level will eventually become standard, once the tech matures enough. Although arguably something like what Ninja Theory is doing already pretty damn good, if you could pull it off for all characters in a game with a huge number of NPCs like TW3, ME, DA, etc.
As for Witcher 3, it's going to be a long time before someone tops it. But at this rate, we might never see anything like Witcher 3 again.
The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don’t always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don’t always spoil the good things and make them unimportant.
That's because they had to strap the actors into a giant Clockwork Orange contraption to get that level of capture.
No, you did not watch the "behind the scenes" if you believe that's how it was done. It's done with cameras, lots of them.
Similar tech is sometimes also used for capturing environments and then made into 3D meshes, the results are again really stunning..
I don't understand why they don't use the L.A Noire Tech to capture a huge library of facial animations to be used for games.. For body movement captures this is often the case, you can just buy e.g a person who is running or fighting, the models themselves can be altered (obviously).
Mafia 3 had great lipsync as well. I'm on mobile so I can't provide links easily, but I will link some when I get back home. Or someone will beat me to it.
If only the materials and lighting ingame would've matched the quality of the animations in LA Noire. The lack of proper shadows is so obvious. Some GI, some proper lighting and no reliance on just phong shading would've made this game look perfect. Just look at that clip. The animations are phantastic but her white collar shines like the fucking sun. Now if there'd be some proper shadows cast by ANYTHING on screen instead of just making the polygons brightness dependent on the normals directional similarity to the light source ... Lighting is much more important than the number of polygons
Imagine her nose casting a proper shadow on her cheeks and her head casting a shadow on her neck and collar... And then some proper GI instead of ambient lighting...
Just found these great unity demos by sonic ether.. some of you might him from the cool shaders he creates for minecraft.
Sorry for off-topic, but I think proper lighting is what makes and breaks good animations as the lighting sets the mood and makes a scene believable or not.
@PumpAction as you probably can see it's filmed with a mobile camera so it doesnt show of the graphics quality very good, that's why the collar shines like the sun.. but its also a rather dated game (2011) so it won't match todays games when it comes to shaders.
You're absolutely correct that lightning is so much more important than number of polygons.. fake lightning is something we humans will notice directly too, just like facial animations, it's stuff that are deep within us and we arent easily tricked when it comes to those things Same with nature (trees, grass) if it looks fake it will annoy us to no end (me at least). It's why i sometimes prefer if games doesnt go the realism route, we're not exactly there yet..
@PumpAction as you probably can see it's filmed with a mobile camera so it doesnt show of the graphics quality very good, that's why the collar shines like the sun.. but its also a rather dated game (2011) so it won't match todays games when it comes to shaders.
Nah, I remember playing it. Apart from the non matching body/facial animations, the lack of a proper lighting engine really annoyed me with the visuals No self shadowing, bad shadow maps, no GI...
And I'm with you on the no realism route. Give me good physics and weight on objects and their movements, good materials and proper lighting and I'm fully happy.
Global illumination in a X360 and PS3 game from ~2010 well nope.
Game was a bit ahead of it's time for the facial animations but the hardware constraints of the previous-gen consoles means you are a bit limited.
(Facial animations were something like almost video files in that game so probably not very demanding on the actual hardware.)
Even games for the XBox One and PS4 use mixed methods for global illumination since real-time accurate GI is far as I know at least simply too demanding or slow.
(Quantum Break uses a mix of two different methods and I think the game is still at 30 FPS, AC Unity uses a static pre-baked system although still really well implemented but the game has a locked time of day environment as a result.)
UE4 and Cry-Engine also uses various methods to fake this as does Frostbite 3.x and Unity though the results are still pretty good compared to a few years back though there are all sorts of tricks and optimizations such as what's it called temporal reconstruction of previous frames and of course rendering effects at 0.5x the display resolution or at half the framerate or even skipping a few frames. (Frostbite has some glitches with it's screen-space reflections due to this but it's also pretty fast.)
Anyways motion capture and other techniques for facial and full body animations are improving as is graphical fidelity even if there's all sorts of optimizations and tricks to retain framerate.
Few years from now though I can see mocap actors being pretty costly as the tech involved becomes more complex for capturing finer animation details.
...Or just breast and dick physics which is also continually under improvement for some reason.
I can see that bringing up some questions for e.g Funcom with their Conan game such as "Why is there a bunch of light diodes on this condom? Actually why is there a condom here at all?"
...I suppose that's why PhysX and Havok have started with procedural soft body physics, can't exactly be cheap to pay this high-profile big-name actor to stand around doing helicopter animations.
(Heh leaked behind the scenes footage from Elder Scrolls 6's mocap session with Patrick Stewart, actually that might be profitable as a pre-order extra...)
EDIT:
PumpAction wrote:
And I'm with you on the no realism route. Give me good physics and weight on objects and their movements, good materials and proper lighting and I'm fully happy.
And realistic hair, guess that's one reason behind TressFX and Hairworks.
(Though for now studios are playing it safe by sticking to the facial area, for now.)
Then again that does go for the head area too really, ugly 2D sprites with some crude transparency layering if it's not some blocky low-poly spiky clump.
Long hair must be pretty difficult to get right too if you're trying to actually have some type of realistic animation or effects such as wind and then there's fantasy or sci-fi whether it's a Minotaur in Greek-ish armor with a axe or power armor and a plasma rifle. Ha ha.
Things are slowly improving in that area too, animals are moving away from simply textured fur and quirks with "fuss" shaders to actually having something looking like actual fur.
(Though weird specular highlighting still ruins things a bit.)
EDIT: Beyond that there's also animations in general and getting all that synced up, Fallout 3 and it's implementation of inverse kinematics or how it was called to make it look like the character always had proper footing was a interesting improvement even if it occasionally made it look like a character had completely broken feet depending on how it connected to whatever was nearby.
Witcher 3 above makes for a good example I guess, most of it looks pretty good and quite natural for a video game whether it's conversations or ambient animations.
Last edited by JBeckman on Sat, 18th Mar 2017 11:36; edited 2 times in total
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when i saw the animations. 
Same with nature (trees, grass) if it looks fake it will annoy us to no end (me at least). It's why i sometimes prefer if games doesnt go the realism route, we're not exactly there yet..
