Character Facial Animation. East versus West.

oXYnary

Very interesting article for those of us who have interest in facial modeling and animation.

A new study suggests that people from different cultures read facial expressions differently.

East Asian participants in the study focused mostly on the eyes, but those from the West scanned the whole face.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8199951.stm


That splains much of anime...

So sounds like if the game is a global audience, the amount of morphs or bones around the eye need to increase as well as having animated pupil dilation.

Thoughts?

Frump

To misinterpret fear as surprise... That must be one bad surprise.

"So sounds like if the game is a global audience, the amount of morphs or bones around the eye need to increase as well as having animated pupil dilation. "

I don't think there needs to be a big increase in eye animation. The article states that the emotions are misinterpreted because the movements of the eyes are ambiguous between certain expressions. So maintaining realism, other cultures just have to deal. There's also the fact that likely there is voice over which is also conveying a lot of emotion, so coupled with the facial expression the message should be understood.

Interesting article though, good read.:)

uneditablepoly

That's very interesting to read through. I disagree with the emoticons thing at the bottom. Because of the internet, things like that are becoming more culturally blended. For example, I know most of my friends and I use o_o as surprise and ^_^ as happy. In terms of reading the facial expressions, I think it's strange that the whole face wouldn't be taken into account by different cultures, although I guess it's been shown through those studies that it does happen that way a good amount. Very very interesting.