The Lamp said:
As awesome as the facial animation is, the eyes are terrible. Glassy and unfocused. Uncharted/2 at least seemed to understand how to properly animate eyes, since they're the most important part of the face we focus on.
I'm watching these beautiful faces harbor dead, motionless eyes and it's very uncanny and annoying.
Yeah, that's my main complaint about their technique as well, aside that it can't be used on original characters that is. Eyes and teeth look like stickers.
iratA said:
As much as I love the Uncharted games, eye detail and animations were probably my single biggest complaint. Eyes are tough and need a lot of attention. I think Heavy Rain had the best looking eyes so far this gen, although animations could still use some work. LA Noire's facial tech really is special though and is the big attention grabber.
What Buckethead and The Lamp were commenting about is not mutually exclusive. In UC2, the eyeballs
animation was simply great, but in terms of look, they had glassiness (on some character more than others) that was sometimes distracting. They've done an amazing job with that in UC3 though, by far the best so far. This
cutscene between Drake and Sullytalking in a dark room looks so amazing - the one the released afterwards not quite as much, but was supposedly early.
styl3s said:
maybe a few years down the road they will develop some kind of a harness cam for the shoulders/chest that allows people to move around it track their entire head/face while wearing mocap suits
Something like what's done for Avatar, basically. In there they didn't record whole video of the face, but just used the footage for the reference points. It's a much better approach in my opinion as it allows for applying that data to any imaginary character design, and it scales up to any high definition 3D model, where this full video capture simply wouldn't.
I'm bigger fan of animating things manually though. All facial animation in Uncharted games is done manually for example. Pixar does things that way too of course, for all of their animation. The artistry comes though when doing things this way, but it's not always applicable for showcasing real world look, and requires the amount of talent few people have. I think it's a bummer that in this game, any time any animation looks great is where they used some kind of capture system. Any time anything had to be animated manually, like all of gameplay, looks really bad. It's like they didn't even wanted to use any effort on that and just wanted to automate things as much as possible.
