Emotion visualization in 3D games

The company Rockstar Games, gained worldwide fame thanks to its Grand Theft Auto video game series, in which everyone could temporarily find himself on virtual, but so close to reality, streets full of violence. In the upcoming new project Rockstar, LA Noire , human faces will play an important role. Australian game developers, Team Bondi, used advanced technology to capture images of faces and facial expressions, which allowed to transfer to virtual space the widest range of subtle emotions played by real actors. In most games up to this point, such large, highly detailed character plans were used only in interlevel videos specially directed and shown for greater immersion in the plot of the game, linking its interactive parts.

In LA Noire, the study of emotions is one of the main features of the gameplay, and therefore, as far as you manage to notice the slightest changes on the faces of virtual characters, the development of the game will depend. Even small emotions of game characters can give you important clues to the crimes proposed by the game. You will have to look at the actors and try to decide if they are lying to you. It sounds damn cool, but what it looks like, you can look at the trailer below. Technology Motion Capture is getting better and better, and probably after a couple of years, the unnatural character animation in games will fade.


In order to get high-quality recordings of the faces of the actors, Team Bondi developed an amazing system of 32 cameras, called Motionscan. These cameras work in pairs in order to capture an actor from different angles in a room filled with intense white light, so that no wrinkle will go unnoticed. The Australian division of Gizmodo managed to get to the studio of the game developers and see what the shooting process looks like.

Nine servers, receiving data arriving at 300 MB / s in a buffer of 45 Terabytes in size, where digital processing takes place, allow outputting up to 50 minutes of finished material per day. Although the actors have to work while inside the system, for hours. Aaron Stayton, who plays a major role in LA Noire, known to the public on the Madmen television series, spent 80 hours inside the Motionscan installation. In the video below, you can see how the work was done to capture the games of Oldton, John Noble (from Beyond the Boundary) and other American and Australian actors, as well as their impressions of working with Team Bondi and Motionscan technology.

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James Cameron and his Avatar raised the bar for realistic 3D-animation with the use of real actors and motion capture technology. However, Rockstar and Team Bondi managed to create beautiful images using their Motionscan technology. It's amazing how quickly video game development budgets are approaching the budgets of Hollywood movies! Do not forget that the cheaper and simple technology 3D motion capture is waiting in the wings, and is likely to find a commercial application in the near future.

Technologies are rapidly developing and in the near future there will surely be games that are as beautiful and realistic as cinema. And LA Noire seems to be one of the first steps in this direction. In the near future, we should expect not only real actors, but also completely invented and modeled characters that will be so realistic that it will be difficult to believe. And I would like to hope that by that time we will still be able to distinguish the virtual from the real.

via SingularityHub