Why do AAA titles often aim for ''realistic'' visuals (with uncanny animation)?
polycounter lvl 9
Well not necessarily ''realistic'' but I think you know what I mean here.
Just go back and watch the last E3 for instance and look at the western titles. Most stylized games are indie or have lower budget (yet they still manage to appeal tot eh audience) and most big budget productions always try to push the visuals as much as they can to reach photorealistic or CGI visuals.
I never myself understood why. Even as an adult, the fact that a game looks photorealistic doesn't necessarily make it more appealing to me and I don't think most buyers care all that much.
Plenty of stylized games sell wells, both in the indie and the AAA market (think of the Jak or the Racthet series for instance or the Nintendo games)...
I am asking this because even thouh, genreation after generation we keep having more ressources to support these types of visuals, alot of aspects still don't look quite right, yet.
My best exemple for this, would be facial animation.
When showcased on a portfolio or whenever they're static, models are super beautiful to look at however, when they start moving in-game, it's never that great and most of the time, they fall in the uncanny valley (although this is much less criticised in games than in movies).
There's a few studios out there who managed to pull it off (props Naughty Dog) but look at the cinematics in Crysis for instance or the last GTA, although, you can see the effort behind the facial animation, it really doesn't hold up enough in terms of expressiveness...
I'm saying this because it's weird when I see stylized playstation 2 games characters being alot more convincing in their emotions than some recent games...
Don't get me wrong, Skyrim and The Witcher 3 have some of the best visuals out there for their time but look the face of the characters, it looks like they feel nothing and I personally can't feel nothing for them (was that too harsh?
) .
The fact that we're limited in terms of technology pushsees the devs to always optimize their workflow and find turnarounds to achieve desired visuals (which is great) but it looks like this concept is always limited to the modelling, I've rarely seen moments where we try to push expressiveness forward...
About those ps2 games I'm talking about, here are good exemples:
PS2:
[ame]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VytsAQbzis[/ame]
Don't bother at the shots where their faces are still pictures though
Another PS2 exemple:
[ame]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZXz0XRS_0g[/ame]
The expressions of the characters are really great if we take into account the polygon and joint limitation available at that time...
Now, as a more recent exemple:
[ame]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQhQ-7Iaw8Y[/ame]
Look at 2:00
I've thoroughly enjoyed the game but this was sadly a missed opportunity to show what our generation of console are able to do at this time...
The more realistc these characters look, the harder it is to achieve convincing animations and I felt alot of devs shoot themselves in the foot whenever they pick realistic graphics.
What do you think of it? If you find anything stupid in what I said, please correct me and forgive my ignorance on the subject ( Muzz be patient with me please...). Don't hesitate to correct me, this is how we learn after all...
Just go back and watch the last E3 for instance and look at the western titles. Most stylized games are indie or have lower budget (yet they still manage to appeal tot eh audience) and most big budget productions always try to push the visuals as much as they can to reach photorealistic or CGI visuals.
I never myself understood why. Even as an adult, the fact that a game looks photorealistic doesn't necessarily make it more appealing to me and I don't think most buyers care all that much.
Plenty of stylized games sell wells, both in the indie and the AAA market (think of the Jak or the Racthet series for instance or the Nintendo games)...
I am asking this because even thouh, genreation after generation we keep having more ressources to support these types of visuals, alot of aspects still don't look quite right, yet.
My best exemple for this, would be facial animation.
When showcased on a portfolio or whenever they're static, models are super beautiful to look at however, when they start moving in-game, it's never that great and most of the time, they fall in the uncanny valley (although this is much less criticised in games than in movies).
There's a few studios out there who managed to pull it off (props Naughty Dog) but look at the cinematics in Crysis for instance or the last GTA, although, you can see the effort behind the facial animation, it really doesn't hold up enough in terms of expressiveness...
I'm saying this because it's weird when I see stylized playstation 2 games characters being alot more convincing in their emotions than some recent games...
Don't get me wrong, Skyrim and The Witcher 3 have some of the best visuals out there for their time but look the face of the characters, it looks like they feel nothing and I personally can't feel nothing for them (was that too harsh?
) .The fact that we're limited in terms of technology pushsees the devs to always optimize their workflow and find turnarounds to achieve desired visuals (which is great) but it looks like this concept is always limited to the modelling, I've rarely seen moments where we try to push expressiveness forward...
About those ps2 games I'm talking about, here are good exemples:
PS2:
[ame]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VytsAQbzis[/ame]Don't bother at the shots where their faces are still pictures though
Another PS2 exemple:
[ame]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZXz0XRS_0g[/ame]The expressions of the characters are really great if we take into account the polygon and joint limitation available at that time...
Now, as a more recent exemple:
[ame]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQhQ-7Iaw8Y[/ame]Look at 2:00
I've thoroughly enjoyed the game but this was sadly a missed opportunity to show what our generation of console are able to do at this time...
The more realistc these characters look, the harder it is to achieve convincing animations and I felt alot of devs shoot themselves in the foot whenever they pick realistic graphics.
What do you think of it? If you find anything stupid in what I said, please correct me and forgive my ignorance on the subject ( Muzz be patient with me please...). Don't hesitate to correct me, this is how we learn after all...
Replies
Especially if you get a lot of positive feedback on it can really encourage someone's enthusiasm to proceed with such artistic ventures indefinitely, until they "burnout" or just get tired of looking at the same type of style.
Since a studio job is what most artists strive for they want to be well prepared for anything that can be thrown their way, at least I'd like to think so.
But again ever since this "next-gen" now border-lining previous gen (with the new voxels and such, 3d printing scanning, ect.)
I've been missing the amazing old hand painted textured artwork that used to be posted, some amazing stuff was made in the past.
Also the traffic on site has slowed down a bit i think because of these changes.
But pretty much what ^ they ^ said.
I don't think the production cost are the differiating factor (Pixar films regular cost 100 millions to make ) way beyond most games even realistic ones . Yeah making convincing animation is much more difficult with uncanney valley humans . Since we don't accept them as cartoons , we treat them as poor imitations of the real thing and break the empathy with average person .and crossing the uncanney valley is incredibly complicated and require some of the best VFX artist money can buy .
Currently models aren't realistic or perfect enough to fool us in a preformance . At Siggraph they talked about how the actual deformation of the skin play into how we see human faces as realistic lol.. pretty sure console don't have the power to simulate 16 k map deformations per character just for the skin., Perfect lighting also effects how precieve the realism of animation (So real sub-scattering =/) . so processing power to achieve total realism is another issue which both console and PC are no where near doing in real time .
Compare facial mocap for movies or pre-rendered cinematics, the actor(s) just have to perform for a specific moment or scene. In gameplay, you would certainly require models to face you, turn their eyelines towards you, turn their bodies and combine body language with face emotions. But you the player, keeps moving around making it pointless.
Think of facial expressions in transition from neutral to extreme say fear, or being in pain, etc.. That's a lot of data. You can distribute mocap from one actor to multiple body types via a universal rig, what's the pipeline like if you require realistic face animations for various face/head profiles during gameplay.
I don't doubt that milestone would be reached soon though, where it's no longer a tech limitation issue. There's that new Adobe tech that projects a proxy model of your head and uses your camera captured facial features and motions to drive it's own.
Fair enough however, here I was referring to cinematics and cutscenes (not the pre-rendered one).
In-game, another animation problem lies and it's the blending but that anoter topic..for another thread..
Marketing has found that teenage boys and young adult men, the prime audience for AAA FPS/Driving/RPG want realism in their games. They want their Honda Civic and AK-47 to look like the real thing.
We're just now getting this to look convincing in film--where we have offline rendering abilities, no rigging limitations, and two decades of research into muscle systems/simulations.
It seems to me that the cost-benefit analysis of more complex rigs and more attention to facial animation always will fail against the cost of greatly increased memory usage, runtime performance implications, and increased authoring time.
Add into this the need to reuse things as much as possible when it comes to rigs and animations and you have a recipe for cookie-cutter animations that can ...sort of ...work across a great number of use cases.
That said, we'll start seeing more attention to this sort of stuff over the next decade in games, I think..
Anyway, I'm right with you on that front. I MUCH prefer stylized animation for exactly the reasons you mention. :-)
See, this shouldve been my thread title.
Well, I know why concretely, it's probably to push the limit further but like you said, if even in CGI, they can't do it properly or have hard time achieving it without any constraint, why do we still try to achieve the same with even more limitation?
I misunderstood as well in the same way then.
But to raise another issue regarding the poor state of animation in real-time visual arts today,
I do not think uncanny animation exists the same way as the sculptor's and Shader's valley. There is just bad realistic motion you notice, whereas Planet of the Apes level of commitment and realistic artistry is just simply enjoyed.
albeit taken for granted considering the weight of such an achievement!
^ respect ^
[ame]
film example yes.
but someday.
Edit: ( actually posted the wrong Koba "stepNFetchIt" confrontation. The performance which has his kiss ass demeanor dissolve into seething disgust hidden by his turn-around to walk away... That one gets me giddy every time I watch it. Amazing work! )
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BTW
Realistic generally sells the mood of a 'mature themed' game more.
Final Fantasy XV seems to be making huge strides in animation, not very realistic looking though, more stylized characters. But you can see details like subtle eye movements and nose flairs so the animation is there.
I don't even think i'ts facial capture.
It's not just faces either cloth is another problem you commonly see with realism where the clothing is too stiff or moves awkwardly. Here it looks like true CG quality cloth.
I'm pretty much expecting squares next movie to be made with a their realtime engine which is what agnis philosphy looks to be.
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i remember though at some point back in the mid 2000's that some companies didn't even bother to blend animation smoothly, which infuriated me. ie one sequence would finish say a run, then the walk would just kick in with no smoothing.
animation is so important because it can even make a bad model look good to a certain extent.
I used to see some great animation cycles posted on PC back in the day.
which is such a joke. in my experience the best stories and character development are usually found in "stylized" games while realistic tend to just ape after whatever some kind of generic hollywood blockbuster storytelling. exceptions exist but the idea that realistic and "dark" is somehow mature is laughable. tbh, the most childish behavior I can think of in an adult is to even worry about what is mature and what isn't.
Im not sure what is laughable about that? I mean it seems quite self evident: Children are not typically considered ready to deal with themes that deal in moral grey areas or show violence and sex/nudity.
Those are mature in the sense that children should probably not be exposed to them.
I just felt the inflammatory nature of your response required a double-take.
Sorry if I've missed the spirit of your post.
Yes, such infantile concerns are beyond us real adults. The very notion that someone would be as childish as to categorize what is and isn't mature is worthy of a sensible chuckle.
I'll be honest, I think very few people really conflate thematic maturity with 'real' (by which I just mean good storytelling and thoughtful handling of the issues at hand) maturity. They're separate things, and the second is far less concrete than the first. Realistic aesthetics to be the harbinger of a game with darker themes, which society has deemed largely unfit for children.
Which makes sense, because if I want to disembowel ~~XxX_Broseph_Joseph23_XxX~~ with a wrist-mounted chainsaw cannon, I'd like the game to look like I'm actually disemboweling a man named ~~XxX_Broseph_Joseph23_XxX~~[1337] with a wrist-mounted chainsaw cannon (call me a sadist, but it's fun).
And I probably don't want my five-year-old watching in horror while I do it.
Third paragraph also explains why I favor realism for some of my games. If you can tiptoe around the uncanny valley, a kill is so much more visceral when your brain doesn't have to work hard to imagine it in the real world.
Realism is also a short-cut to greater empathy. Little/no characterization or narrative required.
Stylized characters tell you volumes about who they are from appearance alone. But a generic guy/gal who might as well be your next door neighbor is much harder to connect with or interpret as such when they're caricatured without any specific character in mind.
Realistic graphics are also a better meter for progression across titles than anything else, when you're advertising games. People will notice your improved progression and ai systems after the fact. But anyone can see that you're now rendering twice as many freckles with twice the accuracy on protagonists Jean Eric, and Hugh Mann(tm)'s faces.
And if you're not sure that something's changed, compare two screenshots to a selfie, and see that objectively, the error differential between the facsimile of the target, and the target itself, has reduced significantly. Suddenly, just the sight of that game you were enjoying so much yesterday is disconcerting, now that you know what you could have.
Besides, if you're a low-level programmer, writing a program generates a picture of virtual reality indescribable from real reality, which also runs at an interactive rate, is kind of a fantastic challenge to beat yourself against.
I agree, animation's fallen somewhat by the wayside, due to a lack of workflow innovation, as well as love from the businesses commissioning it.
Which is a shame, because nothing pulls me out of an experience quite like a bad/rushed piece of animation, be it stylized or realistic. Poor animation is more easily forgivable in a stylized environment, though.
Unless you're someone like Pixar who's so big for their britches that they call the artistic shots down the middle as much as they can. A developer won't have that, not yet at least.
Go with the flow. Indie games have more control over an art style anyway, and that's where the real work is going on.
AAA will be AAA always.
Yet we will still aim for perfection and I think we are going to get close, but I dont think that will be soon.
But to contrary to this we have blizzard's games, lol and dota.
Ps: I don't agree those PS2 games has better expression that present games. What is noticed is that this expression was exaggerated there (rightly).
I agree however that some aspects are evolving faster then others. Graphics obviously evolved most, but AI "way of thinking", silly actions NPC/player has to do just because, are far behind anything. Some things don't evolve and we still see an enemy who is going smoke and then piss over and over like a robot.
In my opinion animations evolved noticeably, right now many titles uses motion capture which improved feeling of characters a lot.
Marketing people understand this really well and will therefore push for realistic visuals even though the story will most likely be poor and shallow. That's what they do, they identify trends and generalities and try to fit their games into these boxes.
In the end, I think the maturity of a game's story is disconnected from its visuals. Both games like Journey and The Last of Us have deep and rich stories with very different visual styles and storytelling methods.
You know the answer to that already, and it's been answered many times in the thread anyways
No animator or art director aims for uncanny animation really. It's just unfortunate when it happens ...
As for the PS2 examples, I think what saves them to an extent is the voice acting. The animations themselves, while amusing, are quite off in terms in pacing and acting and I personally find them borderline cringe-worthy. Quite a few of the facial poses are nice, but overall it looks like the shots were not properly storyboarded and planned (which is of course understandable considering the tight budget). And it's pretty much the same problem with the Witcher cinematic - the characters just move too damn much ! But again, that game is made by a rather small team.
As far as good examples are concerned, for heavily stylized visuals the only one that comes to mind is Ratchet and Clank (all the way back to the first one !), which shows very good timing in its cutscenes and very few awkward idling moments. For more realistic stuff, I think MGS3 hit a very good note (similarly to MGSV as Fuiosg pointed out). The character faces barely move, but the timing, delivery and editing are excellent which totally makes up for the very limited facial animations and the 4th wall breaking tone.
And to play devil's advocate (in the most controversial way possible
[ame]
Now that doesn't make me want to play the game further than out of sheer curiosity, but I thought that was interesting to point out.
Some very lowkey facial animation in MGS3, with the convincing body movements and movie quality shot planning/editing making up for it :
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Of course the faces all looks very stiff, but by that time in the story the player is totally used to this animation style being an element of the game universe and there is no uncanny feeling happening. (not sure what's going on when Boss says "Sokolov ... comes with me" though. Maybe a bug ?). But anyways - such cutscenes do not feel as "time-wasting" as the KH ones where characters stand around in a circle not being quite sure what to do with their arms
In short : I think it's all about good body acting, and good editing
I'm not considering content aimed at children(say below 15). What I'm talking about is arbitrarily labeling things and activities as immature when what really matters is stimuli. We consider playing with children's toys immature because they don't offer stimuli for someone who doesn't need that aid in fantasizing or has already been exposed to it as a child - not because toys inherently are immature. So my point is that any kind of discussion about what subjects are mature or not is completely pointless unless you want to compare yourself with a child in mid-development which effectively is what people try to do when they dismiss stylized stuff as childish.
Obviously, as we grow we tend to find stimulation in activities that offer complexity and originality. Violence in itself offers nothing of that sort, but is a powerful tool when building tension.
As a side note I'm not at all against violence in games, it's simply the case that violence provide strong emotional feedback while still working very well in terms of abstracting it for gameplay mechanics(sex for example doesn't translate well).
As for inspiration from movies, I think that in the west especially in high budget games it's progressed way past "inspiration" and that we now find ourselves in a place where games seem to start out as film-like premises, emphasizing settings, characters and narrative rather than ideas about gameplay - to the detriment of exploring stimulating game mechanics. I honestly don't think there is much games can learn from film(unless you sort of want the game to be one...), since it's a completely different medium. There is huge potential that almost seem to be ignored just because we tunnel vision on hollywood style storytelling.
I wish this was true and maybe it is but even then the urge to appear "mature" still causes the majority to dismiss things they associate as childish - at least in my experience.
I have a hard time agreeing with this in terms of games since we are still so far away from achieving realism. I think your point makes some sense but not practically in the context of realism in games today.
I'm more of a programmer than artist and happen to especially like low level coding
I'm with Skinpop here. I feel stylization is more of the shortcut..a lot of the signatures of stylization are precisely intended to capitalize on a visual shorthand of poses/expressions, especially in animation of faces.
When skillfully employed, this shorthand is a sturdy/fast way to immediately communicate of the animators intent (i.e., empathy, if that's the goal). I feel that if the same library were applied directly to a realistic mesh, you'd quickly run into overacting issues. The same library needs to be coupled with a healthy dose of subtlety in realistic animation..at levels I feel are often unattainable with common game rigs and production timelines.
In terms on an online shooter like Call of Duty, I believe it's much easier to project the identities of the people you're playing with onto a bland generic soldier model, designed in a realistic fashion, than it is to say, a character whose personality is meant to be dynamic, and engaging, and is baked into every element of the character's design.
That said, I'm totally open to the idea that it may just be me, because it very well could be.