Everything looks and animate better than UC4 and UC TLL
Gameplay facial animation
Blending is nearly invisible
Very impressive indeed, but i'll believe it when i see it running on my console !
Yes we will see after visiting Naughty Dog Cory Barlog from Sony Santa Monica said he have seen the matrix
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http://www.ign.com/articles/2018/06/13/e3-2018-the-last-of-us-part-2-is-all-about-honoring-ellie
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Dan lowe is Senior Tech Animator at Motive Studios, previously Visceral Games (Star Wars), Ubisoft Montreal (Far Cry 3 / Watchdogs / Far Cry Primal). He do a frame per frame analysis of the TLOU 2 gameplay trailer
https://www.resetera.com/threads/la...tive-senior-tech-animator.48827/#post-9186815
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Their animation tech is already superb and one of the best (if not the best) out there right now in U4 and UTLL. Completely rewriting something excellent to make it better is such a Naughty Dog thing to do, especially in an industry where reusing as many assets and systems as possible is the typical approach (see animations in TR 2013 > Rise of the Tomb Raider, or Assassin's Creed Origins > Odyssey). I guess that's what time, budget and talent gets you
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I just posted the same sentiment somewhere else. Do you remember when Naughty Dog first showed substantive Uncharted 4 gameplay and there was a super slick sequence where Drake jumped off a precipice, throw a grapple rope, swing around onto another platform, dived down a slope towards a guy shooting at him, kicked that dude off the platform into an abyss then grabbed his gun and started shooting at another bad guy?
It looked so scripted and fake yet this kind of interaction happened all the time in Uncharted 4. The hand-to-hand combat and the way your team co-operated on takedowns was also great. They are just taking this to the next level.
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Watching the E3 The Last of Us Panel and realised I missed some more subtle things like unlike previous Naughty Dog games, the enemies all have names and and refer to each other by name because the game wants you to feel like these are real people. I.e. not like the generic clone army of pirates, mercenaries and raiders found in Uncharted and The Last of Us, where almost no generic enemies had names.
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And Penny Arcade
Well, that U4 was a live demonstration, it even glitched out. The Last of Us gameplay reveal on the other hand was complete bullshit:
It's justifiable that some people are skeptical.
No, they only downgraded the AI. Complete bullshit is something like The Witcher or the very first showing of Uncharted 4.
Great summary of the video of the animator
EDIT:
- He says that this demo in Holy Grail for animation teams. Naughty Dog has made the animation seem completely seamless like it is one long piece of motion instead of separate mocapped animations. He believes it’s a combination of motion capture, physics, and a lot of animation coverage to get it to be systemic versus scripted.
- It is rumored that Naughty Dog is using a new animation system called motion matching, which is the newest approach to animation blending that involves using a motion database.
- What motion matching does is that it matches poses that are the closest to each other so you can seamlessly blend between the two animation poses.
- If the combat is fully systemic, it is very impressive. The fact that there is facial animation on the characters at all times, camera effects, and interruptible hit reactions, make it very believable.
- Enemies have a ton of hit reactions and even react from different poses such as on their knees and can smashed into walls. It might be ragdoll but it looks too good to be so.
- When enemies are hit, even their feet stay in the correct place based on their previous animation state. This would require a ton of hit reaction animations to provide coverage for every scenario. He says this is why people say the scene is canned, but he believes that Naughty Dog has achieved this feat.
- One way the hit reactions could be done is if the game knows ahead of time that you will land an attack. There has to be a lot of lead up. The game carefully adjusts the enemy's pose so that it will move closer to the hit pose to make it easier to blend. Characters can even block your attacks, making it all the more impressive.
- Enemies perfectly blend into their looking around animation state. This is evident from their feet position. The enemies don't have a uniform speed. Instead, the enemies seem animation driven taking actual steps in the game world. It appears to be systemic.
- Enemies may be looking at different points of the environment to move between or the behavior may be scripted. If the enemy AI is scripted, it has to be interruptible at any point.
- Scripting every encounter in the game in this fashion is a lot of work.
- The transition from the initial stabbing animation sequence into gameplay is flawless. You would normally see popping when the physics initializes.
- When Ellie puts away her flick knife in her pocket, it teleports to her back pocket indicating actual gameplay.
- The soft cover system is similar to what Naughty Dog has done in the past. She automatically transitions into cover and out.
- The vegetation doesn't simulate her interacting with every branch, but there is enough approximation to make it look convincing.
- Ellie is able to go into a prone stance that allows her to crouch. This looks player controlled.
- The gutting looks scripted.
- There is a lot of cloth simulation on everything including Ellie's sleeves and jacket. This not only gives the characters life but helps cover the animation blends.
- The enemies seem very aware of their environment. The enemies aren't doing typical path locomotion. The enemies transition into spots where they look around.
- The way characters address each other by name is impressive and makes them feel like real people.
- When Ellie turns around to run and gets shot, she grips her shoulder, walks backwards, and doesn't immediately turn just like a real person would.
- Ellie flips the hammer to the claw side to bash in the heads of enemies.
- When Ellie jumps over the wall, the machete clips through, indicating this is game play.
- He believes when Ellie goes under the truck and gets pulled out, all the Enemy AI is scripted because it feels like a cut scene.
- When Ellie shoots the lady ,when she is under the truck, it appears to be the lady is animated and not using ragdoll.
- When Ellie picks up the bottle and throws it, it is systemic. When Ellie reaches for the bottle, it is magnetized into her hand. When it is played at normal speed, it looks completely natural.
- When Ellie takes the hostage and the hostage gets shot, Ellie looks at the hostage before throwing the hostage aside.
- There is a robust dodging system. It looks like Naughty Dog built a bunch of animation around it as evident from Ellie dodging and bumping into the car.
- Normally you don't want to create narrow gaps because of limitations with physics capsules so it’s impressive Ellie can move through narrow gaps which makes the world believeable.
- If not scripted, the way the enemies line up outside the store is very impressive. Even more impressive is how they patrol and clear a space. They even check corners transitioning perfectly between animations.
- In most games, if you get shot with an arrow, the arrow will fade away. When Ellie is shot, she actually pulls out the arrow. The facial animation is incredible when Ellie pulls out the arrow. He thinks when Ellie is shot, the arrow might be magnetized to certain points so that Ellie can actually grab it to pull it out.
- When Ellie pulls out the dart from the dead guy, it is probably animated versus systemic.
- The way Ellie puts on her backpack from a crouched position is impressive and he would not want to animate that.
- When Ellie shoots the sign in the store, the letters fall down. That arrow could be shot anywhere so it would be interesting to see if it actually affects the environment.
- While gruesome, he loves the particle effect on the exploded body.
- The way the enemy falls over after the explosion; there might be a full explosion reaction system. You have to think about the enemy's current state, his direction, the direction of the explosion, and how far the explosion was. There are a lot of variables that you have to consider when you are capturing all the animation.
- The enemy throwing Ellie over the counter could be done systemically using motion matching. You would look at the environment and do a bunch of environmental interactions similar to what Naughty Dog did with Joel in the first game.
- When the hammer dude swings at Ellie his swing gets interrupted by the shelf so there would need a way to interrupt the animation or a lot of animation coverage for different scenarios.
- The chopping head off sequence at the end is scripted.
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This reminds me when we first saw the footage of Joel smashing some bad guy's head into a counter in The of Last Us and everybody thought it was scripted yet head smashing into environmental objects or walls was something that happened a lot.
I give ND a ton of credit in this respect. Much of the CQC combat in Uncharted 4, later refined in Lost Legacy, just looks amazing.
I didnt think of it earlier but now you made me think naughty thingsok, who else thought of lesbian mini game as in FF7 style while watching the presentation ... or am I only one naughty here?
Impressive technology, unfortunately I'm not a fan of brutality as found in TLoU so I'll have to wait until they put it in a different game.
GamesBeat: Pulling the arrow out of the dead body, is that something new?
Margenau: We’re always evolving different situations you can find pickups in. This moment had happened and it was there, so—
Newman: It’s the same scavenging mechanic that we’ve always had. It’s just a more next-gen presentation.
Margenau: We’re doing everything in the world. If she picks up an object, she really picks it up in her hand and puts it in her pack. If you pick up an arrow, she puts it in her kit. There’s not going to be a handwave and a teleport of a thing. We’re trying to make it so every object physically exists and you carry it with you.”
https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/14/...-game-directors-unravel-their-e3-demo-for-us/
Margenau: We’re always evolving different situations you can find pickups in. This moment had happened and it was there, so—
Newman: It’s the same scavenging mechanic that we’ve always had. It’s just a more next-gen presentation.
Margenau: We’re doing everything in the world. If she picks up an object, she really picks it up in her hand and puts it in her pack. If you pick up an arrow, she puts it in her kit. There’s not going to be a handwave and a teleport of a thing. We’re trying to make it so every object physically exists and you carry it with you.”
https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/14/...-game-directors-unravel-their-e3-demo-for-us/
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