BUILD | GUIDE
GUIDE: FACIAL ANIMATION It’s time that game characters laid off the botox – and there’s tools out there to help, Ed Fear discovers… ith the huge advances in motion capture over the past few years, it’s fair to say that character animation in games is better than it’s ever been. Combined with technology designed to help developers string these animations together, such as NaturalMotion’s Morpheme and Havok’s Behaviour,
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game heroes like Nathan Drake are orders of magnitude more realistic in their movements than in the previous generation. Facial animation is perhaps the next frontier. Although it’s already improving at a rapid pace, there’s still a large proportion of game players – particularly those casual gamers, to
whom the usual anachronisms of realtime computer graphics aren’t quite so forgivable – who aren’t convinced by the current state of facial animation. Speaking about Uncharted 2, one Develop staffer remarked: “It’s beautiful, and the cutscene animation is amazing, but for the most part it really feels like their faces are frozen in place.”
AUTODESK SOFTIMAGE
VOICE-O-MATIC
DEVELOPER Autodesk CLIENTS Capcom, Konami PLATFORMS PC, Linux PRICE From $2,995 CONTACT Via website
DEVELOPER Di-O-Matic CLIENTS Rockstar, Sega, THQ, Activision PLATFORMS Plug-in for Max, Maya and Softimage PRICE $349 CONTACT Via website
The reason Autodesk Softimage is featured here is that, since acquiring XSI, Autodesk has integrated the previously-separate Face Robot toolset into the standard Softimage package. Using Face Robot, artists paint weight maps, wrinkle maps and
Face Robot is now a part of the Softimage package
Voice-O-Matic has been used by a wide range of game developers
www.autodesk.com
www.di-o-matic.com
skin weights to determine the movements of muscles when motion data is then applied. Autodesk has also added a Maya exporter, which means you can quickly bring fully solved Face Robot heads into Maya for further work.
IMAGE METRICS
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Voice-O-Matic is pretty simple: by following a four-step wizard, you can give the program your recorded voice files and it automatically generates mouth and face movements that can then be applied to your models, be they shape-based or rig-based. It
supports most languages, and animators are free to adjust the results, which are stored as standard keys on Bezier controllers. It’s also available as part of Di-O-Matic’s Character Pack alongside other facial modelling and animation tools.
LIFESTUDIO: HEAD SDK
DEVELOPER Image Metrics CLIENTS Konami, Rockstar North PLATFORMS N/A PRICE Varies CONTACT Via website
Okay, so it’s not a tool per-se – for the most part, the magic is done by Image Metrics themselves and funnelled back to the developers – but there has been some mention of opening up parts of that pipeline for developers to do themselves. Also
Perhaps the real advances here, too, will come from the Venn diagram-like crossover between emerging motion capture technology and more impressive tools to help shape that raw data. Here we profile four popular solutions to see exactly what it is that makes them useful, and …
DEVELOPER Lifemode Interactive CLIENTS Ice-Pick, Firefly Studios PLATFORMS Xbox, Xbox 360, PS2, PC PRICE On request CONTACT Via website Image Metrics’ solution was behind Metal Gear Solid 4
Lifestudio:Head can even dynamically generate heads in real-time
www.image-metrics.com
www.lifemi.com
new is a tiered service system: the Value package is perfect for secondary characters, Pro is aimed at in-game cutscenes and Premium is super-powerful, offering ‘pore-level analysis of facial movement’ ideal for glitzy pre-rendered sequences.
Specifically designed for facial animation in real-time, Lifestudio:Head’s real-time SDK features the ability for players to create their own heads in-game or via ‘the laws of genetics’, which sounds slightly ominous. It allows AI routines
in the game to dynamically change the facial animation, and can even hook into text-to-speech systems to animate based on the generated phonemes. The LifeStudio Pro app also features all the automatic lip sync features you’d expect.