Of course, if it was that easy, we’d have engaging cinematic drama gushing from our consoles. More often than not we have horrifying digital mannequins, jerking about like malfunctioning wind-up toys while bored stage-actors drone through the dialogue, wondering if they’ll ever play Hamlet again. Clearly there are many hurdles – technical, practical and ideological – that lie in the way of getting as complete and evocative a performance as Naughty Dog has achieved. But there are now also solutions for developers, offered by thirdparty companies specialising in staging CG performances, combining directorial nous, cutting-edge capture technology and animation expertise, reshaped to fit varying budgets, scheduling and technical requirements.
“I think developers are now acutely aware that they need to have believable characters that can carry a story,” says Mick Morris, MD of Audiomotion, which provides capture services for TV, film and games. “But purely from a technical point of view, it’s only in the last few years that we’ve been able to wrestle a good solution for that out of the available technology.”
Imagination Studios' John Klepper finds that a limited number of markers tends to produce the best effect: "It's mostly about placement rather than number".
Morris points to the latest generation of consoles as the leap in capacity which enabled detailed, lifelike animation in realtime. And in no other area is this as true as the face, the subtleties of which can only be conveyed through a comparatively large expenditure of a game’s technology budget – or so it is often thought.
“Game companies have been avoiding the face,” says CEO Mike Starkenburg of facial mo-cap specialist Image Metrics. “We call it ‘the illegitimate helmet’. There are guys in gasmasks but never any gas in sight. Faces are so difficult to do right that it’s risky, and in terms of the engine’s tech budget, the face can easily be three times as expensive to move as the body.
“The geometric shape of the head – that’s the mesh. The process of moving that mesh in a believable way is rigging. You could move it one vertex at a time, but that would take forever. Instead, animators create a set of controls. One, for example, will open the eye and another will close the eye. I’m simplifying – most mouth rigs have 20 different controls. The body has probably 20 controls. The face can have 60, sometimes a couple of hundred. You can get a really good facial rig with relatively few controls – equal to that of the body – but it’s an optimisation problem, and most people simply haven’t done enough facial rigs to get good at solving it. We have. Inadvertently, we’ve become world experts in facial rigging. Many animators will spend their lives animating bodies and cars and so on, but how many faces do they really do? Even a game like Grand Theft Auto IV has, like, 80 characters. We’ve done literally thousands. So we always look at the facial rigs when we walk in and try and persuade developers to adopt our strategies.”
No other area is as crucial to producing an emotional performance as the face, says John Klepper, CEO of mo-cap firm Imagination Studios: “The face is everything – we as humans look at faces from the day we are born, and we have an amazing perception of its subtleties. In order to be able to transfer those extreme subtleties to animation takes an in-depth understanding of how to rig and skin and weight a character correctly. Eighty per cent of the rigs we get sent look like hell – there’s not a lot of competence, and the difference can be huge if you have something mere millimetres out of place.”
That in-depth understanding is an elusive thing. As Klepper, Morris and Starkenberg say in near unison, the major stumbling block for developers has been in building up the required level of in-house expertise – not simply on the technical side of animation, but in understanding the vicissitudes of motioncapture itself, a process which requires both a keen knowledge of the technology but also demands other skillsets: directing, acting and cinematography.