L.A. Noire from Rockstar

But you wouldn't really see closeups of faces in a third person game. You don't really see closeups of the bystanders in GTA or RDR. I imagine the cut scenes and interrogations will involve characters with this new animation system and the regular joe walking around that's never seen up close will be animated in a different way. Or there will be a lot of repeating civilians. Use the same head and face with different clothes, since you wouldn't see them close enough to know its the same person.
 
Yeah, but even the main cast (that you see in close-ups) in a game like GTA or Heavy Rain or Mass Effect is pretty huge, closer to a hundred than to fifty. Then there's the amount of conversations... it gets scary pretty quickly.
 
Fascinating ! I can indeed infer the characters' subtle emotion state looking at the trailer.



How does the control scheme work ?
 
I think it's supposed to be a third person game, with an open world version of LA, though I read there isn't much to do other than follow the plot line. It doesn't have all of the sandbox elements that would typically come with an open world title.

I imagine it will be a lot like Mass Effect. Lots of dialog driven real-time cutscenes with some type of options tree. It looks like the investigation bits will feature a lot of interactive cutscenes as well. I'm kind of wondering if it will have the locked third person view, or if it will be directed views like an old school adventure game in certain places, like crime scenes.

I am REALLY looking forward to this title.
 
This is basically digitizing taken to a new level and not really facial animation, IMHO. Impressive results, but at the cost of serious limitations - but we've been over this before as I recall ;)
 
Reminds me of that Cinema 2.0 (there was a video of a woman being captured and showing some colored height levels) or something that ATI was working on, didn't they also use cameras to capture facial motion and store it in some voxel based type technique?

*Here's one article of that
 
Laa-Yosh said:
This is basically digitizing taken to a new level and not really facial animation, IMHO. Impressive results, but at the cost of serious limitations...
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Yet the gameplay it offers is actually a generational progression for once. Or is it? I mean, you could video-capture 2D video and have a brancing selection from lots of pre-recorded choices. As this technique is just prerecorded acting and not created on the fly, it's in essence a choose-your-own-adventure story, like Dragon's Lair, and not a real open-ended game. Like many story based games, but still... - I'm suddenly questioning if this is something to get excited about in games!
 
dialogue animation are prerecorded yes, like are audio dialogues in every game, but they also can record simple emotion animations to put those during the game at any time.
We could see such technique in games like fight night for example, would be great to actually see convincing emotions generated by the punches.
 
To be honest, not all the facial animation is uniquely recorded - at least the way I understand the tech, there are two stages. First they capture color + normal maps and geometry for every possible kind of facial expression (based on some system of elemental small expressions) and build a facial rig. Then they record audio and facial movements to drive the rig, at the same time.
There's also the separate session for the body mocap, which of course brings up sync issues but those are even more problematic in scripted gesture-based systems like Mass Effect.

Then again I might be wrong at it may really require completely unique capture data for every second of facial animation... but that'd mean a huge amount of data!


The real question here is how much of the gameplay these interrogation scenes are. If there's driving, shooting, puzzle solving / evidence searching, then it should still be more then Dragon's Lair.

And every other RPG today relies on prerecorded acting too, it's just that they only record voice which is probably a lot faster and easier to work with, so they can offer more content. I'd say the Mass Effect games still has like less than 40-60 hours of voice altogether, even if you combine all the possible dialogue options for both the male and female protagonist. Of course there's also the entire combat and exploration part too...
 
Laa-Yosh said:
And every other RPG today relies on prerecorded acting too, it's just that they only record voice which is probably a lot faster and easier to work with, so they can offer more content. I'd say the Mass Effect games still has like less than 40-60 hours of voice altogether, even if you combine all the possible dialogue options for both the male and female protagonist. Of course there's also the entire combat and exploration part too...
Click to expand...

That's a lot! 40 hours is almost 30 ninety minutes long movies, and if you assume characters talk 50% in a movie, you get an awful lot of dialogue compared to the medium where acting is far more crucial.
 
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