Words cannot describe how excited i am for this!
http://www.xbox360achievements.org/news/news-7132-L-A--Noire-s-Groundbreaking-Performance-Capture-Exposed-In-New-Video.html
L.A. Noire
Game » consists of 17 releases. Released May 17, 2011
- PlayStation 3
- Xbox 360
- PC
- Xbox 360 Games Store
- + 4 more
- PlayStation Network (PS3)
- Nintendo Switch
- PlayStation 4
- Xbox One
L.A. Noire is a detective thriller developed by Team Bondi in Australia and published by Rockstar Games.
My Mind Has been Blown!
Thanks for the link, I've been looking forward to see what Rockstar meant when they said Team Bondi was on to something special, and it shows in this footage. Whether it will be a defining part of LA Noire we'll just have to see, but it gives us a nice glimpse at what devs can do beyond improving better texture and display resolutions, HDR lighting and framerate.
Would love to see it work, but I'm skeptical.
Sure it will put some people out of work, because they will no longer be required, but that's just how all industry evolves. Before long it will seem archaic to painstakingly model a real life object by hand when you can just sit it in front of a camera.
Holy crap on a cheese topped cracker. That right there might have just single handedly sold me on the game.
I could not stop saying things like "Holy shit!" and "Goddamn, look at that!" while watching this. I didn't think any game would have better facial animation than Enslaved for quite some time, but LA Noire blows it out of the water.
This is swiftly becoming one of my most anticipated titles. Between the deliberate pacing, the evolution of the adventure genre, the unique setting and the absolutely stunning graphical advancements, it just is pushing all the buttons I could possibly have. Can. Not. Wait.
This has already been on the top of my hype list since I heard about it for the first time.
I can't fucking wait.
I think the natural extension of this is the full body capture tech they used in Spiderman 2 (doc oc falling at the end, 100 percent CGI full body capture). Replace those thousand cameras with film cameras and you've got something that tracks your body movement and facial movement at the same time, and you can even have someone else nearby reading the other lines so they have something to play off of.
While the tech is indeed impressive, you always have to be very careful about these things.
1. As was mentioned, this just smells of million-dollar investments. I would imagine that paying one hour of capturing an actor like this equals to several days of more conservative capturing / animation. More investments means more expensive games, means less venturing, less originality, less everything else. Personally, before we perfect facial animation, why not make games narratively interesting first? I think the current, 09/10 technology is enough to carry narrative and content innovation in games for the next 10 years; because everything else is still very much stuck in 1998.
2. These videos always make it look like the cameras can magically turn an actors face into a fully rendered, skinned mesh. This is not the case. After the capturing, there are still hours of work done by an animator of mapping this (visual only?) data to the 3D mesh, with varying results. You can expect there to be a kind of discrepancy like it was the case with, for example, Final Fantasy X: Sometimes you get the "expensive" face, sometimes you get the "cheap" face, especially in minor characters. This is annoying as fuck.
Still, hugely impressive footage I see there. I just don't think it gets us any further in making video games more interesting and engaging.
Also, though I definitely agree that this tech alone isn't going to make the 'game' part of games any more interesting, it will definitely allow developers who can access this tech in the future to really flesh out characters some more, right down to the facial subtleties that complement their defined personality within a game's story. Of course as you said, we would need developers to make better narratives first for these characters to play their parts with better purpose. Currently I really do not see many stories in games that would have benefited from these advanced facial capture techniques, as the stories themselves are too basic, in my opinion at least.
Regardless, good to see a new method of face capturing improve to such an amazing level.
@ShiftyMagician:
I would agree with you if the industry had not shown to fail in that regard so much in the past. Yes, of course the technology will become more affordable comparably quickly. Yes, of course technological innovation should, in theory, not hinder content innovation but in fact support it. In reality, however, this just does not happen. In games, technological advancement is racing like a mad man, and it is almost only ever used to make 20 year old things a little prettier or a a little more accessible, and even when technology slowes down (like with the current, 5 year console generation) nobody is interested in exploring its potential except for matters of volume, size, polish and presentation (namely imitating as many movie cinematography/editing conventions as you can).
Rarely anyone stops to think what magical boxes of wonder and potential current consoles and the PC are. Rarely anyone wants to - or is able to finance their wishes to - explore the types of characters, worlds, stories and concepts you could have an audience experience interactively.
This is what makes me cynical about every next best "look how awesome this tech is" video. What the medium needs is the creation of a demand of more culturally, aesthetically relevant content. The tools are all there, but the demand is smothered in a continuous flow of added shine and superficialities.
So I am saying: We already have more than competent facial animation tech. Let's get really excited and innoventive with that first before we invest in and oogle over an even shinier tech.
" @ShiftyMagician: I would agree with you if the industry had not shown to fail in that regard so much in the past. Yes, of course the technology will become more affordable comparably quickly. Yes, of course technological innovation should, in theory, not hinder content innovation but in fact support it. In reality, however, this just does not happen. In games, technological advancement is racing like a mad man, and it is almost only ever used to make 20 year old things a little prettier or a a little more accessible, and even when technology slowes down (like with the current, 5 year console generation) nobody is interested in exploring its potential except for matters of volume, size, polish and presentation (namely imitating as many movie cinematography/editing conventions as you can). Rarely anyone stops to think what magical boxes of wonder and potential current consoles and the PC are. Rarely anyone wants to - or is able to finance their wishes to - explore the types of characters, worlds, stories and concepts you could have an audience experience interactively. This is what makes me cynical about every next best "look how awesome this tech is" video. What the medium needs is the creation of a demand of more culturally, aesthetically relevant content. The tools are all there, but the demand is smothered in a continuous flow of added shine and superficialities. So I am saying: We already have more than competent facial animation tech. Let's get really excited and innoventive with that first before we invest in and oogle over an even shinier tech. "That is definitely understandable and again, you make valid points which I hope developers hopefully think about as well before they rush to new endeavours.
The one thing that disappoints me about this game is that the faces look amazing and the rest of the graphics look average. Even the guy whom I presume is the main character is wearing a box'y hat that just takes away from the fact his face looks amazing. I hope the only reason the graphics look like that is it's taking so much memory or processing power or something to be able to show those faces.
" It doesn't look that great, there's something really weird looking to it, could be the eyes. "The face is captured from a static motion and projected onto a traditionally made 3d body that moves the head around and shit. So there's a weird juxtaposition here that you don't get in games like Uncharted or Enslaved.
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