Capturing Expressions and Life

I find faces so interesting, expressions can convey such a range of thoughts and attitudes in a person that it creates a uniqueness that is incredibly difficult to capture. So recreating this, this spark of life, in a virtual world, in Games or Animation must be a hard task. If done badly it can create disturbingly 'off' characters, but if done well is so impressive, and immediately engages the audience.
This is why I found the two talks at BAF - Games, by Jay Grenier (Image Metrics) and Brendan McNamarah (Team Bondi) fascinating, as they both address capturing 'life'.


(Image Metrics www.image-metrics.com) - Faceware 3.0
With the constant releases of games, expectations for character quality from the public grows and grows. What most aren't aware of is that the budget to create these games doesn't necessarily increase with this demand, meaning higher quality visuals are having to be created with limited funding. Reliance is having to rest on talented animators. Image Metrics, founded in Manchester, developed technology which creates a form of facial animation that captures an actors performance without the use of markers (as usually used in facial capture). It also allows freedom, as any video footage can be used as reference (within reason) and still allows there to be an artistic definition between the actor and character. 


This software has been used in such games as Crisis 2 and Red Dead Redemption. By creating matching keyframes of your model to your reference footage the software recreates the movements, basically transferring the actors performance to your model, this allows freedom to enhance expressions and tweak /add more key frames/etc. to the model to build a character who are individual to themselves, but have aspects of the performance from your actor.The software works by specifically selecting different aspects of the face to create key frames (for example the eyes, etc) and copies even the most minuscule movements, such as a slight eye-flicker, which further enhances the illusion of life. 


(Team Bondi) - L.A.Noire
The technology used to capture the actors performance for L.A.Noire also avoids using markers, to create as Actor friendly process as possible. However, unlike Faceware it doesn't interpret the actors performance, but captures it completely, leaving no real space for animators to properly have any creative input into the performance and instead relying solely on the actors performance. Capturing the performance is really impressive and causes a very high sense of realism with the characters, as every twitch of the face and eye flick is seen. Cleverly, a lot of the game play revolves around this, as you attempt to work out whether someone is lying or not, it's an idea that works pretty well, making the game quite original, despite it obviously being influenced by film noir. 
There was a lot of development before the technology worked to the standard required, this involved finding out how many cameras were needed (it ended up being 16 pairs) and how to avoid using a too intense light (contacts were attempted but this didn't work.) and there are still areas where the play could improve.

(Wearing an orange shirt helps 'cut the head off' in post-production and the green ball in the centre of the chest helps put the body on the skeleton)

Because of the high realism of the faces the rest of the game seems static in comparison, the heads sometimes looking 'attached' to the bodies. The movement of the bodies are done with the actors too via motion capture, so yet again the actor is conveying a performance, however, this and the animated clothes aren't of the same high quality so seem a little strange. This has caused the idea of Full-body-in-costume-capture in the future to be sought after. 


However, I think what has been achieved here is brilliant, as it gives the characters life - and has a purpose for it. It's incredibly detailed - with a range of 'reaction' shots and emotions being filmed for the character to have when they are not speaking, as well as obviously being a large project (over 400 actors were used).


Having more emotionally readable faces creates many possibilities for games, animation and the stories they tell, meaning these developments are paving the way to great things.