It’s time that game characters laid off the botox –
and there’s tools out there to help, Ed Fear discovers…

With 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, 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 real- time 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.” 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 …
 

Voice-O-Matic

DEVELOPER
   Di-O-Matic
CLIENTS
   Rockstar, Sega, THQ, Activision
PLATFORMS
   Plug-in for Max, Maya and Softimage
PRICE
   $349
 

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 modeling and animation tools

Written by Ed Fear, Develop, November 2009 Issue