This is just too cool to be left out. Next month, Rockstar Games [the makers of the controversial yet ridiculously fun Grand Theft Auto series] are releasing their newest game : L.A. Noire. The facial animation of the characters in this game has to be seen to be believed.
First official trailer :
A few videos explaining the gameplay a bit more :
..and a look behind the scenes on how the facial animations were created :
This is definitely a big step forward for actor/story-driven games. For more info on the game, here's the link.
Last month, we organized the 3rd Adobe User Group Meeting right here in FCM. Pretty interesting stuff, with discussions about Maya/AE integration, using Blender as an open source alternative, and camera tracking in AE among other things [Nicky, maybe you can post a few pics/do a short review on the session?]
We're in the middle of organizing the annual Animation Career Week [which should be held early next month]. It's open to everybody, completely free, and will take place over the course of 3 full days. There will be speakers from animation/FX houses, post-production companies, game studios, and probably some talks from government & financial representatives to give advice on career opportunities and management. Stay tuned.
Aside from that, Research Creation Exhibition #3 2011 has been announced! It's taking place late this year, and most of us are already scrambling to get our projects together. More updates on that will come, as the projects get more fleshed out.
This year's annual GDC just wrapped up last month, and as expected, all the big guns brought out their... well, their big guns to the show. New games were announced, new trends and techniques were discussed and, as they do every year, new tech was showcased.
There's a ton of videos out there for you to find on what went on at GDC, but here are a few of my personal favourites, involving new technology/software :
Autodesk! Showing off their 2012 lineup.
Nvidia's APEX integrated into the 2012 versions of Max & Maya [PhysX/hardware accelerated solvers for dynamic simulations such as cloth, rigid body collisions, particles, destruction effects and even foliage]. There's a lot more videos of these on youtube. About time this showed up, it's been in development for years.
Maya 2012 has a whole bunch of new features [editable motion trails, enhancements to the viewport, new render pass management and the list goes on and on] but here are a few features which really stood out for me.
Digital Molecular Matter [DMM] for realistic shattering finally comes to Maya -
More variety and new applications for procedurally generated textures -
Editable motion trails in the viewport [byebye graph editor?] -
Max 2012 also comes with a lot of enhancements - here's an interesting video from Grant Warwick comparing its performance with previous versions [he also has a full review video of Max 2012 if you want to look it up].
Mudbox 2012 also has significant upgrades, with improved performance, transparency support, new blending layers, new painting options, support for texels and so much more.
As for realtime rendering, Epic also released demo vids for the latest iteration of their mind-blowing Unreal 3 Engine, sporting a whole bunch of DX11 features -
...and Crytek refused to be outdone, showcasing the features available in their new CryEngine 3 techdemo -
There are so many more videos out there on what went down at GDC 2011, so if you're interested, hunt them down. One thing's for sure, there's a lot of exciting stuff coming our way very, very soon.
The Kinect gaming peripheral has been out for the Xbox 360 since late last year - however, it seems the most interesting things that people have been using it for are largely non-game related.
One of the uses hackers have discovered for it? Using the Kinect as a motion capture device! The motion data can even be saved in Autodesk's Motionbuilder, making it possible to port the animation over to Maya, Max and XSI.
There's a ton of videos on youtube regarding this, but here's a few to get you started. It's apparent that there are some issues with depth accuracy, occlusion and jiggles in the capture - but I'm fairly certain those things will be sorted out soon.
This was something I worked on last week to test out ZBrush4's new 'Spotlight' feature. More images can be seen here.
Modeled entirely in Sculptris [which is FREEEEE] and textured using Z4 Spotlight. So now there are quite a few ways to go about texturing in Zbrush - Projection Master, Polypainting, ZappLink, etc.
Cool thing about Spotlight is that it combines the best of all of those together into a single tool
there's no longer a need to keep switching between apps
reference images can be loaded directly into ZBrush
free viewing of the model without the need to project from a single angle
hue, saturation, opacity, contrast, etc. ->all can be done on the fly
texture generation is so easy -> tiled UV layouts have no seam problems
..and so on and so on. There's just so many things about Spotlight which takes the stress out of texturing work. Check it out when you can.
Azman, Nadia and I are working on a VFX short, so there's definitely a lot of tracking work ahead for us.
I was trying to think of a practical method of tracking everything that :
didn't rely on auto-tracking [too many points, accuracy is suspect + too hard to make precise corrections]
doesn't require a whole lot of measuring work for survey data [too tiring and prone to errors if measurements don't match up]
doesn't depend too much on different perpendicular planes to define spatial dimensions [limits the locations/settings that we plan to shoot in]
uses tracking points from whatever's already in the scene [no need for manual tracking markers, minimizing painting and post-work to cover them up]
After a night of experimenting, a little trigonometry, and a little help from Nadia, I think I've managed to come up with a low-tech solution that might work. Here's our first test. A bit shaky [the measurements were done very carelessly], but I think we proved the technique works.
Continuing my obsession with interesting free stuff...
insight3d lets you create 3D models from photographs. You give it a series of photos of a real scene (e.g., of a building), it automatically matches them and then calculates positions in space from which each photo has been taken (plus camera’s optical parameters) along with a 3D pointcloud of the scene. You can then use insight3d’s modeling tools to create textured polygonal model.
If this works as well as it says it does [I haven't tried it out yet], it could prove really useful in collecting survey data for tracking purposes really really quick... we could totally skip the process of measuring everything in detail.
More info and download links HERE and online tutorial HERE
