New LA Noire trailer "The Technology Behind Performance"
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Rockstar released some more behind the scenes footage of their animation system. Check out the video after the jump
I don't know if they've improved the quality past what I've seen previously but for some reason this seems a lot more solid than what they've released so far. If this technology runs on a 360 without impacting performance too much, it might just be as revolutionary as they say...
While I can't say we've jumped uncanny valley, this is damn impressive, especially for realtime. Facial animation and animation in general has lagged behind the rest of the industry as far as advancements go so its about time it got a little lovin!
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But as I've been formed as a traditional animator, it always makes me cringe when people say that mocap is so much better than regular animation because of its realism or whatever. I regret that in most of the video game business, animation has always been sort of put into the sidelines, it's just been an afterthought and nobody has ever tried to really push the envelope.
With today's processing power, it WOULD be possible to have Pixar/Disney quality animation, just by giving more room to the rigs.
I always feel a bit of sadness when I watch a movie like The Iron Giant or Tangled, with beautiful, carefully hand-crafted animation, and I think that videogames never even got close to that level. Realism isn't automatically better, like a lot of people seem to think, movement can also be stylized, just like shapes and forms, but it seems nobody ever really explored that route as far as it could go... More and more, animators in the videogame industry are just becoming mocap cleaners, and cleaning mocap animation is not fun.
Anyways, LA Noire will definetly kick ass if the gameplay (what IS the gameplay exactly ?) matches the quality of the rest.
In another interview their animation director (probably inadvertently) back handed traditional animators, and I think it was very unnecessary to be almost hostile about traditional animation. "I've never talked to an animator who likes to animate that stuff, because the results are never as believable as you want them to be."
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=78304
What that guy said about animators not liking to animate faces is crazy, that justs sounds like classic marketing bullshit to me.
I think that there are two flaws on their system, even if I DO find it pretty amazing :
1. Forcing the actors to play "facial animation" separately hinders their performance because they have to play it twice (obviously), but also because you need your whole body to act, and having to stay still on a chair while acting must be REALLY awkward. Their face scanning technique seems doomed from that aspect of things, because there is no way they can face-scan in a regular motion capture environment, it needs to be a separate process to work. It's not like the actors are gonna walk around on the motion capture space with a 32-camera helmet on their head !
2. Face scanning makes it hard to do any kind of touch up work. If each head instance has different topology and textures (which it looks like on the trailer, look at the mouths), how can you productively edit the animation ?
But this tech is still in its infancy, and ultimately I hope it will make things change in the long run and be a benefit for regular animation as well. But some of these people need to watch what they say about animators, it's irritating, photography hasn't replaced painting and neither will this.