FACE T IME
Animation director Chris Stone is planning a performance-capture session for Kevin Spacey. “This is going to be our third epic shoot,” he says. “He’s definitely the biggest name I’ve ever had the luck to shoot with.”
Stone was Visceral’s animation director for eight years, but performance capture technology has come a long way since he joined the Dead Space team. “I’ve been shooting motion capture for probably going on 12 years now. It started out really rough, painful – you’d have to imagine what it was going to look like. But when we shoot performance capture now, we have the virtual sets there that the talent can see while we’re shooting. Our capture technology is brand-new HD camera tech that they came up with in this last year, and it’s what James Cameron is going to be using in Avatar 2.”
Sledgehammer has captured each actor pulling a preselected range of facial expressions to build a working muscle framework for each face. The range started with a few dozen, but now runs to well over 200 – more in Spacey’s case. “These facial scans look at every sort of muscle crease, every expression that he could possibly make,” Stone says. “With traditional performance capture, you can move points on the face, but there’s never a way to have a swelling of the lips or a volume change. The beauty of the muscle simulation is every single point on the face moves, not 30 or 24 or any random [arbitrary] number; it’s every single part of his face moving.”
The studio will fall back to a prerendered solution in between-level cinematics, though, because for all the power of new console hardware, it still can’t match a render farm. “We’re going to avoid any sort of disconnect, because our characters will look the same [prerendered],” Stone says. “It’s mostly about resolution. Game consoles still aren’t rendering for hours to make a single frame. Until game consoles get to that point, there’s always going to be things we can do [prerendered that we ordinarily can’t.]”
So nostrils will flare, eyebrows will raise, and foreheads will wrinkle, but will anyone notice? “It’s funny, because I think if you ask someone, they might not be able to sit down and tell you it was the crease in the corner of his eye that made it look real… I think most players don’t necessarily know what’s wrong when it’s not right, but they know when it is right.”