Very impressive stuff and although the graphics seem to have only been slightly improved from Heavy Rain, the facial animation tech is definitely much improved, now showing a tongue that actually moves and realistic teeth shaders.
I give a lot more value to a true geometrical approach to facial animation like this than LA Noire’s method of superimposing video over geometry, that while is technically much more precise, it also is kinda cheating.
So, speaking as Black Mesa’s choreographer, I’m always curious about how much effort was put into things like this…and at times, I’m curious how much it’s worth it.
If you want something expressive enough to evoke emotion, it doesn’t need to be realistic - in fact doing so may reduce it’s emotional capabilities. What’s more, you can bet that if this is the high-detailed character, the people on the street in whatever game they’re making won’t be nearly as detailed, and will look a little weird in place.
These individual demos look cool, but I worry that even if you finally spend billions of dollars on getting the technology just so, and require that your artists spend hours and hours on each scene getting them to look just right, you achieve an effect that could have been accomplished by abandoning realism altogether.
But if they were to make an entire realistic-looking engine with reusable textures and models -maybe with a slightly more advanced version of Black Mesa’s face-creation system- than perhaps it wouldn’t be so hard. In fact, it might enable them to use it again for separate projects. But I do agree that anything that needed to be made for a specific scene would probably be a real bitch to hold up to graphical-par. But I’m in support of hard work going into art – which might be too easy for me to say knowing that I can’t use SDK without ripping my hair out.
Also, I don’t quite understand what you mean when you say that realism has an opposite effect on emotion. Unless there is something deeper in your meaning, I would have to disagree. Emotion can easily be plucked by humanizing a character or adding traits that you can actually have neurological reactions to - for instance, an attractive appearance. Adding the attractive and realistic looks added a romantic level to the video, making us actual tap into a sub-form of love. Moreover, when you see her crying and in fear, it should create an almost ingenious empathy. Also, pay attention to how fast the conversation became when she was being disassembled. This is a very well-thought-up tactic to get our blood pumping faster and to make us anxious. It’s all too clever if you ask me.
While I agree that it isn’t the only way to invoke an emotion reaction, I certainly don’t think it’s hurting the chances of it occurring.
As much as I loved Heavy Rain, I would prefer something with more gameplay. They’ve got the emotion and story stuff downpat but if they could put amazing gameplay with it it would be amazing. That being said, whatever they end up making with this engine I will most likely love.
I don’t think it hurts chances - as long as it’s executed correctly. It just takes a whole lot of effort to execute it correctly. I’m pretty much just talking about the uncanny valley, and the risks you take getting so close to it; on either side of it.
And yes, humanization of your characters helps in a lot of ways, but you need to look at which elements people specifically look for to be human. Usually, all you really need is a good look at someone’s eyes; this being why anime often has characters with eyes that go from big to small based on the emotional needs. (Ironically, this is coming from someone who hates most anime)
Just as an example, I refer to Pixar’s latest movies. Carl Frederickson is certainly a very caricaturized and barely-human appearance, especially in comparison to something like this. Yet the two most famous scenes in Up weren’t about comic-emotion at all. They were about very real tragedy, and had a profound effect.
Even in terms of love, you can get that with even MORE unrealistic characters in Wall-E. Those characters’ expressions consisted of tilted binocular-sockets, and Eva’s LED-eyes. It really doesn’t take much for the human mind to recognize a face, and then prescribe an exact emotion to it. It just becomes more difficult to accept the more human a character is; it’s almost God encouraging us not to make our fictional characters human, and let our creativity take charge of character design.
While I doubt they’ll get a game looking that good, what with all the other stuff a game has to do, that was definitely a sweet video. And the technology is very cool. Really nicely done.
L.A. Noire’s technology (motion scan) is a dead end with zero flexibility. Even producer knows that and doesn’t use it anymore. They used newer, “better” and more flexible technique in Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, called Mocam, which unsurprisingly gives worse results…
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.
