Horizon Zero Dawn has the best facial expressions I’ve seen yet. First I noticed the lip synching was very good. Then I noticed it also seemed to be doing procedural micro expressions as well as small eye saccades. Paired with subtle and expressive voice acting it’s remarkable.
Are you being serious? Don't get me wrong, HZD is an amazing game, but man the faces are absolute robots. That's not the team's fault though - any open world game with lots of dialogue will pale in comparison to hand animated faces.
> any open world game with lots of dialogue will pale in comparison to hand animated faces.
Pretty sure this won't age well - or that it's already aged out. There's only so much animators can do. In the film industry algorithms often augment an animator's work. Often they do the bulk of the work, and animators will fine-tune to get the exact effect envisioned.
Also, artistic animations can look great, but they can also be very inconsistent. Even more so when you need multiple people to work on thousands of lines of dialogue. It also requires an enormous budget - not all studios will have Gollum-like funding for every single NPC.
That said, I agree eye movement is a great way to convey feeling, and Horizon Zero Dawn did it well (and its DLC even better). Yakuza 0 is another example of doing a good job. The exagerated animation style also shows in the characters' eye movements. A great sample is this sequence that, very conveniently, shows a blind character that lacks eye expression. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfVqfelfYHo
I mean HZD. Haven’t gotten to HFW yet. I think the animation below the neck is subpar, but not the faces. On a hunch I checked Last of Us 2. To the best of my observation, the eyelids, circular muscles, and nostrils don’t micro-twitch, and the eyes don’t regularly saccade. That’s what I’m talking about.
Need the go back and try to push on with forbidden West but man.. it was brutal even after just finishing ZD;not sure how approachable it will be after a long break.
Forbidden West is the sequel that came out in February. From "it was brutal even after just finishing ZD", it sounds you're mixing it up with The Frozen Wilds DLC that came out for Zero Dawn.
Forbidden West has some of the best mocap with voice acting I've seen in a while since the God of War 2016 game. It's one of those things that's part art and part technology really, but making better tools will get this over the hurdle I think.
Do companies use machine learning for face animation at this point? E.g. capture a bunch of facial mocap data and phoneme streams and train a transformer model on how the face would move given a new stream? I guess it's probably easier just to translate phonemes to facial movements with much the same outcome?
Agree. Not sure how much could be blamed on the poorly written dialogs. In contrast, for example, Witcher 3 was so engagingly written that I never minded the procedurally animated dialog scenes.
For me, it was definitely a visual thing. As in, they look plastic in stills too. There's just this very unrealistic uncanny valley thing going on when characters smile that few games have been able to get around so far (but I haven't really played any latest gen stuff, so maybe its improving).
Young Aloy was worse than adult Aloy [1] but its like that for adult Aloy too, and most other games, although I found HZD worse than most in that respect. I haven't played Forbidden West yet, so I'm curious to see how much they've improved there.
