source facial animation actually makes me pretttty uncomfortable so id be ok with people like
not trying to rival it
Source facial animation is so good it makes me tell real people their faces are poorly animated
WHAT? No. Absolutely not.
LA Noire manages expressions; I will grant that. But those expressions, A. Are not very powerful, B. Do not change to fit dialogue. Even when they claim to be using an actor’s actual face in the recording, I am dead sure something is being lost in translation. Maybe it’s bad capture, the wrong capture points, or maybe the actor doesn’t realize he has to put his all into the facial motions, but it just doesn’t look believable.
Source felt more powerful to me, as a choreographer for BM, because you get to control each individual part. When you really want to put full emotion into the scene, you can control every twitch as you develop the scene further and further. With mocap, everything is so difficult to edit, you have to get it all perfect in one go. Furthermore, you’re not even taking a close “understanding” to what happens on someone’s face in reaction to certain elements.
Made this in Face Poser a long time back, in about an hour. I don’t even think I finished it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIdRScLbbNw
no PC version = not a rival
To be honest though LA Noire looks like shit.
EDIT: Also it’s very old, but Jill’s Song is pretty cool.
You know, when I was a kid playing games like ROTT (Rise of the Triad) I used to wonder why they (game designers) couldn’t just take pictures of real items (guns, arms, wall textures) and apply them to in game objects. Then I learned that in the case of ROTT, they did, and as another example, in Doom they actually used a picture of a bloody knee to create a wall texture.
Then everything had to be done “in the engine” … and now they’re just taking videos/pictures of real things again. My, how things are cyclical.
Mind you, I know next to nothing about game design (2 elective college courses for gaming and a handful of programming classes) but while the capture technology is impressive (combining video from dozens of cameras into a CG model) it seems too complex and out of place in the game world. That is, laying a “real” video over a 3D model.
Sorry for rambling, it’s late 
While that was good, I personally don’t find it to be expressive enough, it seems very stiff and ‘puppet’-like compared to the natural, flowing realism of the L.A Mocap stuff.
I agree with what most of you are saying though and it’s clear that this technology (for gaming at least) is in it’s infancy. As for no PC support, that will surely come later. 
There is no doubt that its more realistic than source, its just that source is dynamic and generally more useful.
:hmph:
Ugh… it looks really odd. The graphics quality isn’t following through with the facial animation, as already mentioned the uncanny valley effect comes to mind.
Also having the actors sit down while they’re recording the facial movements makes the performance look “overacted” and loses some believability. Can’t they put the actors in that big room and have them play like they’re shooting a movie while at the same time recording their movement and facial expressions?
Look at the movies where the actors are left alone in a green screen/blue screen environment pretending they’re reacting to something or someone. It’s a fucking disaster.
Ok, there are already games that captured the actor’s facial reactions but it always felt “artificial” and out of place. The animators that were still animating by hand could create a more consistent feel throughout the games.
There is one CG facial system that I’ve seen ‘somewhat’ work, and that was Avatar. For the blue avatar people, they did the whole acting at once (on a greenscreen), but had a special system involving a “helmet cam” to record facial motions during the scene.
Why are we even discussing this at all? Source is a brilliant engine with great face posing, very dynamic. However, the technique used in LA Noire is perfect for the type of game it is, Faceposer just wouldn’t work. It’s how well it works in game, is it not? It isn’t how dynamic it is. Especially since there won’t be user created content in the first place.
Great, facial animations that come close to realism. Too bad everything else in the game looks as fake as a Christmas tree made with lead pipes.
did anybody else realize how tin like the game sounds, even in the trailer, the sound quality seems off to me.
EDIT: after re watching some of the videos, the main characters voice is very stiff and the opposite of compelling. It seems that i liked every voice actor bar the main character, well maybe his partner too. As for the animations, besides the face, they seem very stiff.
It does look odd. Acting and sound feels a bit stiff imo
animation looks good… now they need to work on making the people look good.
There was no ambient sound.
Also, no matter where they were, the voices sounded like they were recorded in a small room, even if they were outside in the open.
That might have been on purpose, to emulate soundtracks from films of the period. I thought the voices sounded like they were coming off a phonograph record, myself. And that was good- that’s exactly how a game set in the period should sound.
Except not when the visual style is going for realism. If they’re going to make it like an old film, they should make it like an old film.