After watching some videos of some top games like GTA V, Just Cause 3, etc. I noticed one problem that I want you, developers, to warn of so you can be ready to make your game actually feel better than theese. And it is: emotions. Whenever I see thouse games, I see this:
o | o
And nothing else. Just a flat, emotionless face. It doesn’t show any form of emotions. It makes the character not feel real. In reality character would show a bad feeling face when wounded, smile when having success, show exhausted face when being in action for long time, showing angry face when someone shoots him and so on… But thouse games just show the :|. It makes them wrong. I want you, though, to pay attention to this. To make characters alive. If you make them alive, I will rate you way higher than those companies. I know we can all do this, make something really good. And this fact I mentioned is just a one step to next game generation. So go on, and make your characters alive!
That’s work for the animators, who usually aren’t developers. Also the armture usually doesn’t have a rig for the face or the fingers on the game, this is done to improve performance, thought in cutscenes or so they change that armature, I actually don’t think it would be a problem to change the armature with LOD so yeah, it’s definitively possible, but it’s work for the animators.
Hm… Aren’t cutscenes a pre-rendered videos? It would make sense if they would be. About bones - one additional bone for yaw isn’t much of a cost…(maximum 2 bones, one of yaw, other one for eyebrows). And fingers usually have 2 bones per 4 fingers and 2 bones for thumb).
About bones - one additional bone for yaw isn’t much of a cost…(maximum 2 bones, one of yaw, other one for eyebrows). And fingers usually have 2 bones per 4 fingers and 2 bones for thumb).
Those are 22 more bones per character, when a low poly character usually has arround 20 bones, so it’s more than the half. You are duplicating the costs of animations, thought any modern computer would probably be fine with that anyway. However, detailed expressions need more bones than that, just saying. (I’m not an animator by the way)
A lot of modern games have started hardware skinning their characters in hopes of speeding things up, but I wonder if its feasible to animate the face entirely using just a shader on the GPU like how they did with grass shader instead of using traditional bones, I doubt the method will look convincing but just a thought
a lot of effort to create them, especially when it shoul look plausible
rarely seen in-game (depends on the genre and camera settings)
can go awfully wrong (see movie industry)
To bring a character to live it is much more obvious that it constantly moves. You notice theese little motions of the feets, legs, body and so on. This is much more obvious then facial poses. I do not think that a indy developer should focus on that.
It does not mean it is not used in games, usually together with cutscenes, that focus an very different aspects than interactive scenes. I mean with FPV you do not even need to model the main character as it is not visible to the player.
