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Voice-O-Matic
Develop
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November 2009 |
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It’s time that game characters
laid off the botox –
and there’s tools out there to help, Ed Fear discovers… |
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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 …
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Voice-O-Matic |
DEVELOPER
Di-O-Matic
CLIENTS
Rockstar, Sega, THQ, Activision
PLATFORMS
Plug-in for Max, Maya and Softimage
PRICE
$349
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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 |
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Written by Ed Fear,
Develop,
November 2009
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