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When we initially showed Mass Effect at E3 2006 I recall a handful of Square developers attending to evaluate the facial animation. While it looks like their production methods are somewhat dated due to the long development cycle, playing FFXIII shows the eventual result to be outstanding – presumably due to their dedicated engine for facial closeups and meticulous planning.

The google translation for the piece is especially bad, but so far I can gather:

• Like Square Enix studio-offshoot Feelplus, cutscenes are divided into 4 categories depending on importance. A & B level cutscenes employ full keyframed facial animation (with lip-sync done individually for both Japanese and English versions). C & D level cutscenes just use procedurally-generated facial and lip-sync animation.
• Similarly, the cutscene team is divided into four distinct teams that handle each progressive stage of creating a full cutscene. They are:
  • Motion Capture Group: Shooting and cleaning up motion-capture data.
  • Body Motion Team: Creature keyframe animation, and human motions that cannot be captured.
  • Facial Group: Facial acting and lip-sync.
  • Simulation Team: Hair and cloth simulations.
• Cutscene shoots are meticulously planned ahead of time. Beyond storyboards, clean layout boards that contain descriptions of the actors, props and set layouts required for each scene are created.

• Temporary voice-over was used on the set with full ADR done later. Interestingly, it appears that animatics were projected on the walls during the shoots to give the actors a better sense of their virtual counterparts and surroundings.
• Within Motionbuilder, additional tools were created to easily allow editing and exporting of complex scenes via a check-box matrix of assets vs shots, seen at the lower-right of the image below – something I’ve had in mind for some time as the best solution for working on scenes that require a lengthy full export only very occasionally.

• Character-wise, the highest resolution characters (Lightning and Snow) consist of up to 223 bones, covering the basic skeleton, auxiliary (corrective and simulation), facial and hair bones.
• The keyframed facial animation was done via a traditional slider setup. The image below shows the numerous attributes, which must have become quite unwieldy and therefore given rise to the need for a dedicated team to specialise in this area.

• For simulations, the wind level is initially set for each scene to provide the requisite amount of movement in the simulated assets.
• Around 20 bones are used for hair, employing a spring system that dampens as a character’s inertia increases to prevent crashing with the head.

That’s more than can be said for my human companions. Our drunk driver Roger didn’t talk much, though he was always friendly, and the ice-queen with whom I shared a tent was 100% business. I even hung a picture of her on the wall and had the car re-painted in her favourite beige, but all to no effect. She wouldn’t even look at me…

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While I can’t fault the animation, it would be nice to know if they experimented with removing the in-between interpolation to more accurately recreate the 2D feeling, as some charm is lost when the motion is smoothed out during the initial comparison they give. Regardless, I’m sure the studio’s consistently endearing characters come through in the story as much as in these great visuals.

This is a good time to share a trick I found online, enabling one to dive into the assets of many app-store games to get an idea of how they were created. Simply copy the app file (work with a copy so as to retain the original file, which you’ll find in your My Documents…\iTunes\Mobile Applications folder) and rename it from .ipa to .zip – from here it’s possible to explore the contents and view the available movies, images and animation frames with WinZip or similar.

It should be noted that some apps are better than others, (depending on how well-organised the developer is and, as far as I can tell, the bit-depth of the .png files), but there are some gems to be discovered.

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You know your artform is maturing when even homages are becoming part of pop culture – especially when the BBC picks up on this. It’s worth watching ozzy Simon Cottee’s pixel-art documentary referenced in the article – I’d never before considered the comparison between pixel-art and pointillism.

Some technical insights towards the end, but most interesting of all is the emphasis placed on the human side of the shoot, something that comes through in the finished work. Regarding casting:

“Well, we start with the obvious things – e.g. talent, distinctive voice, whether an actor is appropriate for the role, etcetera. But since we’re looking for people who will be doing both the mocap acting and the voice, we also watch how the candidates physicalize their performance. It’s also important to see how they deal with adjustments and to see if they take direction well. For the top candidates, we’ll actually bring them back for a second audition and have them perform a scene with Nolan (North, who plays Drake) to make sure they have good chemistry.”

This should certainly factor into anyone’s plans to create an animation or motion-capture database for their studio – something that’s good for both animators and designers to ensure both parties are aware of the content they have at their disposal. Download the fbx plugin for Quicktime here.

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That old post reminds me that Rockstar are still one of the few developers that have fully adopted Naturalmotion’s behavioural physics-based Euphoria, (most likely due to NM’s stipulation of inserting their own guys onto your team), leading to some unresponsive controls which are thankfully greatly decreased in the recent cowboy offering. The big sell will undoubtedly be their soon-to-be-released “Backbreaker” above, featuring character-on-character interactions as a centrepiece.

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