Road for Next Gen Animations : Changing philosophy.

[Shifty Geezer]

You are saying that normal mapped textures could be animated ?!!

Anyone please could confirm this ?

A normal map is just a 2D texture describing a variation to be applied to the face normal with RGB corresponsing to XYZ axis (and thus only X and Y channels, the reg and green components are used). You can thus process normal maps as any texture, creating procedural textures, modifying existing textures or creating frames in an animated texture.

Here's a program I just Googled that creates procedural normal maps, as an example
http://www.texturemaker.com/screenshots.php

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I'm not so sure about the "motor-level" AI per se... it's more accurately referred to, even in the academic literature, as "style-based kinematics." Which is to say that physics will actually play second banana. There are some cutesy little things about re-establishing a "balanced" position from one that is "unbalanced", but as far as the tool is concerned, the question of "balanced" is based on how you define it in the static animations. So if you build a library of canned animations where a guy's normal method of locomotion is standing and hopping on his head, I believe the system will assume that is his balance condition.

So the actual level of physics animation is pretty low, and basically it's jat a fancy canned-anim blender contrary to popular coverage? That'd be a big disappointment.

 

[FouadVG]

A normal map is just a 2D texture describing a variation to be applied to the face normal with RGB corresponsing to XYZ axis (and thus only X and Y channels, the reg and green components are used). You can thus process normal maps as any texture, creating procedural textures, modifying existing textures or creating frames in an animated texture.

Here's a program I just Googled that creates procedural normal maps, as an example
http://www.texturemaker.com/screenshots.php

But if this is true, so why the animations of GOW are catastrophic
And Lair and MGS4 use characters of more than 120 000 polygons. Why they dont do like GOW ? (10 000 polygones only, if they could animate the normal mapping textures )

 

[Rodéric]

So much time & space wasted...
People did answer you already, but as closing words I'll make a quick summary of my own.

Polycount have NOTHING to do with the quality of an animation.
A good animation must be well made and have rather good sampling rate (just like a sound) in order to play/feel good.

Polycount just makes a model detailed, as do normal map.

You can make a very low detailed model well animated (any N64/PS1/early 3D PC game), and you can make ultra high detailed model (100ks of polys and normal maps) poorly animated.
There's NO relationship in how a model look and how well it is animated.


Just go play MGS, ICO, or Shadow of the Colossus (to name a few), to see low detail models properly animated.