Sony to Bring “Highly-Realistic Faces” to Naughty Dog, Sony Santa Monica and Guerrilla Games

A7

Best hit detection you'll ever see.
Sep 11, 2013
2,194
761
1,570
Australia
http://www.dualshockers.com/2013/12...ty-dog-sony-santa-monica-and-guerrilla-games/

Naughty Dog, Sony Santa Monica Studios and Guerrilla are all working on upcoming games for PS4. We already know that Naughty Dog is working on an Uncharted title, Guerrilla on on a new IP and while only flimsy rumors have been heard about the new game, or games, in development by the folks in Santa Monica. What we do know, now, is that those games might have “highly-realistic” or even photorealistic character faces.

Sony Computer Entertainment America posted a new career opportunity ad seeking Blendshape Artists to work with the Visual Arts Services Group, responsible to work in the faces of the characters for the publisher’s AAA Studios, including the ones mentioned above. Here’s an excerpt:

The Visual Arts Services Group is a division of SCEA’s Product Development Services Group. VASG is a full-production studio located in San Diego that specializes in Animation, Motion Capture, Cinematics, Art and Scanning. We are currently looking for Blendshape Artists to come aboard and work in conjunction with our riggers, the Animation Supervisor and the Art Director to bring highly-realistic faces to life for both cinematic and in-game sequences. The successful candidate will be working with all of the triple A studios like Naughty Dog, Santa Monica Studio (God of War Franchise), Guerrilla and many more!

Responsibilities:

*The Blendshape Artist will be responsible for bringing highly-realistic faces to life for both cinematic and in-game sequences
*This person will make the final tweaks to the topology edge-flow and determine the final positioning and refinement to key assets such as eyes, teeth, tongue and eyelashes
*When the model face is finalized the artist will sculpt a full array of naturalistic FACs and corrective blendshapes for expressive photorealistic human*Sculpting a series of high-resolution wrinkle maps to add a final level of polish and nuance to the expressions


For those unfamiliar with 3D modeling and animation, blend shapes are very powerful deformers used in Maya, that create the illusion of a shape changing into another in a realistic and fluid way.

While we still don’t know much about the games that will come out from Sony’s most popular AAA studios, now we can definitely expect them to have some really awesome faces and facial animations.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Myownsun
I think we already have highly realistic faces. There's quite a few in NBA 2K14. Where everything becomes a disaster with these "realistic," faces is mouth movement. There isn't a single game that has come close to getting that to look natural. NBA 2K is especially bad. Laughably bad.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Dno69
Fine by me, I just wish they would focus on more interesting and expansive worlds with the same level of emphasis, to me it could be a FMV of someone's face and I'm not any more immersed in the experience. I was bored to tears with every single sony exclusives level design except journey, and i like that game's design for another reason.

Look at half life 2 locals compared to what we are getting from these console exclusives, no soul, just explosions, pretty faces, and gifs with banderas looking at a short polished area, or even worse, a cut scene. How far we have fallen in a relatively short time. These games have become micheal bay experiences with a synthetic dose of soul injected in them. TLou did more things right, but still in line with the others.
 
Faces are really important for conveying character emotion and reactions to events/other characters. I was playing Walking Dead last night, and it's amazing how much is conveyed between the characters without any spoken dialog, just by just a look, a half smile, a raised eyebrow, a frown -- and that's with relatively crude animations. Not to get too professiorial, but biologically, the human face has an enormous number of muscles in it, precisely because communicating emotion is so critical for us. So, I'm glad they're working on making faces better. It's much different than prettier explosions, imo, and key to making game characters and their reactions/interactions feel more alive.
 
Faces are really important for conveying character emotion and reactions to events/other characters. I was playing Walking Dead last night, and it's amazing how much is conveyed between the characters without any spoken dialog, just by just a look, a half smile, a raised eyebrow, a frown -- and that's with relatively crude animations. Not to get too professiorial, but biologically, the human face has an enormous number of muscles in it, precisely because communicating emotion is so critical for us. So, I'm glad they're working on making faces better. It's much different than prettier explosions, imo, and key to making game characters and their reactions/interactions feel more alive.

I agree, I just feel like we are already there with conveying emotions pretty well, but there are just very clear weaknesses in game development, and facial expressions aren't it.
 
I agree, I just feel like we are already there with conveying emotions pretty well, but there are just very clear weaknesses in game development, and facial expressions aren't it.

I can be a real fault-finder when I want to turn my Scrutinizer up to maximum. If you catch me in one of those moods, I could give you a looong list of things videogames need to do better. Facial animations is on the list. So are several dozen other things.

I'm not in that sort of mindset right now though. It's an evolving medium, I'm actually very impressed with the multiple leaps forward lately. Sure there are areas for improvement. There always will be. Doesn't mean we can't appreciate the improvements as they come.
 
Last edited:
Ryse has some excellent mouth movement and facial expressions. Quantum break looks to be even better. ISS seems decent as well in the cutscenes I've seen.

It will only get better going forward.
 
What Sony can't do, NVIDIA can. We need this gorgeous hair shader.

 
Ryse is ahead of Shadowfall in its mocap and facial animation quality. Even The Last of Us and Beyond Two Souls has better facial animations. That's due to devs putting more time and money into better motion capture, not more system power.

So hopefully Naughty Dog steps up and delivers.
 
Ew. It looks like his hair is composed of a single texture and with your average joe spectacular shading. Dawn's hair is literally 100x better.

Yep. Really no comparison. Dawn's hair blows his away.
 
^^ That there is an opinion you are entitled to imo, but Dawn is definitely a noticeable step ahead in every area. The cutbacks in DS to make a 1080p/30fps demo possible were not invisible, especially that last gen hair rendering. SE's next gen demo was also a noticeable leap over what DS is doing.
 
R* games and Ryse look very good.

When they say highly realistic faces, I hope that includes eyes, teeth and inside the mouth. Nothing wrecks good facial features or lip syncing than zombie eyeballs staring at a wall with no blinking, and blatantly fake looking grey Chiclet teeth with a blackhole mouth when the characters talk.
 
R* games and Ryse look very good.

When they say highly realistic faces, I hope that includes eyes, teeth and inside the mouth. Nothing wrecks good facial features or lip syncing than zombie eyeballs staring at a wall with no blinking, and blatantly fake looking grey Chiclet teeth with a blackhole mouth when the characters talk.

Try Beyond: Two Souls. Those are some fantastic and realistic facial animations from last gen. Can't wait to see what they can do this gen.
 
I thought we already had highly realistic faces across most games. I think the faces in Ryse looked pretty amazing. The players faces in NBA 2k14 are life like.

No doubt Naughty Dog, Santa Monica Studios, and Guerilla Games will deliver. Their games are always top notch in graphics.
 
The best facial animations I've seen done so far in videogames, I think is in the couch in the start of TLoU, more specifically the excited kid with the gift. :)
Also the end-scene were fantastic compared to all other games, but that were a less dynamic range of emotions performed. :-/