LA Noire

Cheez

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.

doc rob

The facial capture is very good. It must be a lot of data for the animation. It doesn't appear to be parameterized, though, so you'd be limited to real actor's faces.

Sean VanGorder

I read about that new animation system in the Game Informer article a while back, it's some sexy stuff.

It's amazing how similar games are becoming to films now. I felt like I was watching a movie trailer.

Bigjohn

That looked awesome. I love it.

And since their appearances are being captured directly to textures, they can be made up by film industry makeup artists -- "it's more realistic than character artists can model, these things have been done on the big screen."




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.

sprunghunt

the facial animation capture technique sounds very similar to what you can get from FaceFX

jipe

I know I'm being a nitpicky animator, but we should probably distinguish between "facial animation" and "mouth animation". The lip-sync looks spot on, but the rest of the faces are stiff and almost entirely devoid of emotion.

ErichWK

The voice acting is pretty nifty! Isn't this a PS3 Exclusive? If so, rad as hell.

doc rob

jipe, I'm not sure what you mean. It's not film-quality, but there is certainly a lot of creasing and face deformation going on there that you wouldn't see with a simpler system like a wrinkle map. The eyes (notoriously difficult) are really good as well. They can't avoid some uncannyness because they're trying to do realistic characters, but it's the best I've seen in a game of that style.

Bigjohn - I don't think this technique can be used with stylization - it appears to be similar to universal capture.

Sean VanGorder

ErichWK - I think I read it's for 360 as well.

Mark Dygert

I support what they're doing, even if he does back hand animators.

"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."

Haven't talk to too many animators have you buddy. Call them silly but there is an entire industry and schools packed full of people who eat up facial animation. Thats the bread and butter of the 3D animated feature world.

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...

glynnsmith

The main character is totally the blond sales guy from Madmen.

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.

Steve Schulze

It's been in development hell for a long, long time. I'm surprised it's come up as well as it has. I'll be interested to see how it looks outside the cutscenes though.

Anyway, whatever happens, it's nice to see a large and potentially successful title coming out of Australia.

aesir

Firstly, the skin doesn't look that good...

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.

Frump

The lip sync stuff looked great but when I was watching the trailer the materials and awful body animation were all I could see. The animation on the arms is virtually the same as it was in Vice City. Extremely stiff and waving around. It's almost a tradition at this point or something. It looks so bad.

Visuals aside, I really look forward to this game. I'm glad we're going to see more non-GTA games from Rockstar.

Cheez

So they captured/recorded whatever the facial animation separate from the full body mocap. Looking at the clip again, I feel like there is a disconnect between the face movement and the body movement. Cant quite put my finger on what exactly it is.

gauss

Rockstar got a whole lot of care for advancing the visuals which is laudable and all but I think they place their emphasis so strongly in the performance category it's hard to feel excited for the actual, you know, game-playing part of it

Steve Schulze

Did anyone play The Getaway? Given the head honcho's came straight from working on that to setting up Team Bondi and developing LA Noir, I'd expect it to have some similarities. I never got to try it myself. Was it any good?

Ninjas

This facial animation takes a huge shit on all of that "performance capture" stuff Zemeckis spent years on. It looks a lot less cartoony than the animal critters in Avatar even.

HonkyPunch

I would much rather they just do what they did with Red Dead and GTA4 for the facial animation, and just focus on making a detective game that actually makes you do detective work instead of fondling glowing objects until you find blood.

Rick Stirling

sprunghunt wrote: »

the facial animation capture technique sounds very similar to what you can get from FaceFX

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

bbob

L.A. Confidential the game? Hell yes.. :P

DKK wrote: »

I'm going to cross post this from the news article.

Fuck If I don't love the noire Genre, and fuck if I won't buy this day one; But ugh, I think the visuals are ass., I'm getting serious uncanny valley vibes, the materials are all cloudy and low res looking, and the animations are stiff. I don't think we will ever be able to get a 1:1 from actors to in game, without good artists and animators in between, Naughty Dog has done it right, Valve has done it right, they both use mo-cap, but they have animators who know how to tweak mo-cap to a point where it doesn't suck.

Valve doesn't use mocap, do they?

eld

Yeah, I think they started using it heavily with l4d2 though.

sprunghunt

Rick Stirling wrote: »

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

Yes I was getting faceFX confused with these guys:
http://www.image-metrics.com/

ebagg

Looks really badass...I wonder if this game will be similar in gameplay to RDR and GTA4..

00Zero

i absolutely hate the voice acting of the main character. its devoid of all...character. its like they just picked some random guy off the street to read a bunch of lines and recorded the first take.

Hazardous

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYRxzGzdFFc[/ame]

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.

Jungsik

THe Face animation WOW.....................

rooster

is it just me or do the hats look huge?

aesir

Two things from that latest video:

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.

kaze369

I think this technology helps advance the industry to better realism but I think it still takes experienced animators to sell the expressions of the face. Maybe some research team will find a way to combine mo-cap and facial animation cameras in one space.

bbob

rooster wrote: »

is it just me or do the hats look huge?

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:

3devo

i love how in the vid they show how they've captured all the facial animation nuances in the actors preformance. and then destroy it by putting him a hat. made me lol brilliant fail.

Arcanox

Anyone notice that the actors faces are almost pasted right on the figures and the lighting situations don't match up in some cases?

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.

vofff

New video from Rockstars

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=498627717023&oid=51752540096&comments

Andreas

Very impressive tech. The gameplay hasn't changed at all since GTAIV though (arguably III!) with some detective bits tacked on. Keeping an eye on it anyway.

glottis8

http://kotaku.com/#!5756015/solving-the-mystery-of-la-noires-gameplay

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!

Habboi

Heh there's a mini argument going on in the comments of that vid XD

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.

Ninjas

This is the best game ad video I have ever seen. The game looks cool too.

bounchfx

wow that trailer looks excellent. definitely made me interested in the game, whereas before I couldn't care less. the body animations are still naturally a step below the facial captures, but even those don't look nearly as awkward as they did before.

will be keeping my eye on this for sure.

glottis8

Habboi wrote: »

Heh there's a mini argument going on in the comments of that vid XD

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.

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?

Habboi

I must admit when I watched the trailer above I went "Ooooo" at all the gameplay features shown. I kinda like the idea of being a detective and solving cases. I hope it doesn't get too repetitive is all.

Steve Schulze

But hey.. they still have some time.. and red dead and GTAIV had really good lighting.

I'm confiscating your ellipsis rights.

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.

Justin Meisse

hmmm, am I the only one in here that has had the discussion with a programmer: "you can have feature X but we have to cut feature Y to make up the performance cost"

glottis8

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Afy1l4nbEpc[/ame]

Skamberin

Argh, am I the only one who loves the facial animations but HATES how the eyes look completely dead?
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

PixelMasher

yea the dead eyes and weird skin shading are creeping me out and overpowering the awesome nuances of the facial animation. this kinda animation on the uncharted characters would be mind blowing.

CrazyMatt

I'm astounded by the sheer awesomeness of the facial animation for once in a video game! (sorry hl2)...

arshlevon

the facial capture is super impressive, although i feel like it would look so much better with some type of skin shader.

rasmus

Facial animation is amazing, but seconding the dire need for better skin shading... Also, am I the only one annoyed by every single voice sounding like it came straight out of the recording room, regardless of where the character is speaking?? Whether indoors or out, all the voices have the same flat sound. It's a real immersion-killer and pretty glaring...

slipgatecentral

I'm cool with lame shading as long as characters animated this way and has such cool voiceovers. At some point I just started ignoring it - faces deform so damn well, eye motion, lips and cheeks look alive. damn Rockstar, this is fucking awesome.

slipgatecentral

Skamberin wrote: »

Argh, am I the only one who loves the facial animations but HATES how the eyes look completely dead?
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.