Eww, anyone else think her mouth was REALLY weird? And it's a tech demo people, look at Motorstorm's tech demo:|-Sniper99-
motorstorm's tech demo was CGI. this one is not. It was created on a PS3 dev kit using Quantic Dream's own proprietary PS3 engine running in real-time.
before people start bashing this demo, please read these few quotes for an interview with IGN last June.
IGN: The Heavy Rain demo was definitely one of the more impressive games in Sony's booth at E3, how long had the team been working on it prior to the show?
Guillaume de Fondaumière: In fact, we spent less than three months to put the demo together from scratch, which includes developing the PS3 engine, writing the script, making the auditions to find the actress, defining the Mo-Cap techniques and doing some basic R&D for the tongue and hair.
Initially, this demo was a purely internal technical prototype that was not supposed to be shown outside the company. Our original goal was just to define if it was possible to create a next-gen character able to express complex emotions and what it would take on a technical point of view. David Cage wrote a script where the actress would go through different emotions in just a couple of minutes, from the very shy and naïve actress of the beginning to the drama at the end with real-time tears. He also wanted to know if we could make the audience listen to her, care for her and react to her emotions in a similar way than with a real actress.
Sony saw our work-in-progress and asked us for the permission to show it in its booth at E3 to show what could be done in matter of virtual actors on a PlayStation 3. The challenge was that we were only a few weeks away from E3 when the request came in and had not planned to finalize "The Casting" before the end of June.
This video is thus just a technical demo showing only what we were able to create in a limited amount of time. We expect to significantly raise the quality of our characters for our next games. We usually do this type of internal prototype to learn something. The Casting showed us that having a real acting performance with a strong emotional component was now something achievable, although we still have a lot of work to reach the quality bar we are aiming for.
and about the lipsyncing..
IGN: The animation in her face was fantastic but the lip-synching looked like it wasn't quite finished. What kind of technology is the team using to create this kind of character emotion?
Thierry Prodhomme: This demo is just our first test. We are in the middle of our R&D and artistic research on virtual actors, so we are still far from the final result (although the audio in the AVI is slightly desynchronized compared to the real-time 3D version running on PS3).
Creating emotion on a virtual actor requires the combination of many elements. Graphics or animations are just some of them. We tried to work on the lighting, the directing, the script, the animation of hair, her tongue, and her fingers. It is really the consistent combination of all these elements that create emotion. This is why it is so difficult to achieve.
From a technical standpoint, we used facial motion capture (Vicon Peak's new generation MX40 cameras and system), combined with a muscle system to emulate the complex and subtle moves in the face. We experimented with different things on the lips especially. We wanted to find a way to emulate the elasticity of the tissues and the insane amount of muscles we have in this small area. Having more rigid lips would have given a better short term result, but again, the purpose of this prototype was really to experiment new solutions. The visual result is of course not satisfying yet, but we learnt a lot in the process.
Most techniques and technologies used in this process are proprietary and I cannot say too much about it at this point.
many of you must think that they spent two years creating this demo.
link to the interview: http://ps3.ign.com/articles/711/711613p1.html
Log in to comment