GameDev on MEA facial animations & expressions.

I couldn't give a toss to be honest.
Story, choices and characters are what I want. Nice animations should be an 'as well as' not an 'instead of'.

And before someone brings up "[DICE Game] has great facial animations! Why can't BioWare get those guys?" Animating the 5-10 characters in Battlefield game for upwards of 30 minutes (maybe) of cutscenes isn't the same as animating 40+ (that's an arbitrary number, but probably close) main characters (many of whom aren't even human) for however many hours worth of cutscenes. Even if BioWare used the same recording technology, the logistics are entirely different.

Naughty Dog does, indeed, BUT, (maybe as you know, since you seem knowledgeable in that area) facial mocap requires that the character's mesh looks closely like the actor performing the mocap. If not, as it is the case for Elie in the trailer for TLOU part 2, animators have to correct the facial movement mocaped by hand, to fit Elie's facial mesh. Either way, it's still a lot of tedious work, as you indicated.
That, however, only works for set characters. As I explained in another thread, customizable character simply can't be animated as finely as set character's, because depending on how you've customized it, the face will be deformed very differently from canon Ryder, and possibly cause vertex intrusions. So you need a less pronounced, more neutral animation that will hopefully fit most (except the truly extreme and horrifying customizations, of course, there's really no hope there). I fully expect our protagonist's facial animations won't be that great, better than this, because they definitely can improve some, but it definitely won't be as rich as a TLOU. Side main characters (like our companions), on the other hand, should be much better.

Besides, considering the number of animation errors/mistakes there are in that whole scene, I'm fairly confident it's only work in progress. My guess is that they wanted to showcase an interrupt that wouldn't spoil too much of the story (Sloane being shown in the second Ai guide, they don't have to show one with another major NPC), as it is a gameplay demonstration, after all.

FFS, I'm so sick of people bringing this up and calling it "hand-animation" when it isn't. Yes, Naughty Dog were boasting in all their previous games about how it was motion capture performances all the way, except they had to animate faces by hand because they didn't like the current results of facial capture. Turns out, hitting next gen they found use for it.

NOTHING is hand-animated about the faces. The actors wear blue dots all over their faces while performing that translates their face movements 1:1 to the game models, and the rest is touched up or polished by hand.

And regardless BioWare would never be able to do this because ND wouldn't either, if they had to animate for 100s of characters for a 30+ hour non-linear adventure. Doesn't excuse Andromeda looking absolutely subpar in facial animations on the other hand, but sometimes I shudder when I see people making Naughty Dog out to be, as if, game developer GODS or something because the only reason their approach works is because it's so overly cinematic and then only 15-20 hours long and everything you'll experience in the game is authored more or less, whereas in BioWare, CDPR or other games there's much more reliance on playability and mixing together story branches. ND makes great stories and good movie games but they have a minimalistic approach to making use of the gameplay to do anything besides enhance the already predefined visual things going on on the screen. It makes it feel like you're always following in the footsteps of the creators and once you get that feeling Naughty Dog games "diminishing returns" sets in and eventually you're just kinda unimpressed in spite of how pretty everything is.

I was bringing it up mostly in the context of why ND is able to do hand animation and why it's very unrealistic for BW. The point I was trying to make is the same as your last paragraph, but apparently I failed at making that point. Also, partly, I see lots of people in this forum point at bad animation and say that it's because it was hand animated, when that's not true. There's good and bad hand animation, and there's good and bad mocap. So, I wanted to give a recent example of good hand animation. Apparently, this was not a good example. That's what I get for doing a quick Google search. My bad. I won't make that mistake again.

I believed that specific gif was hand animated. If I'm wrong, I stand corrected. That said, I'm certain that it would have needed extensive hand correction because of the hand passing in front of the face (covering markers), and how that hand affects the mouth underneath, etc.

But if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I won't be offended by being corrected. That said, I don't think I wrote anything putting ND on some kind of pedestal (I mean, it's true that they're one of few game studios known for animation, specifically. That's all I pointed out). I know that they make sacrifices in order to allocate their resources into animation. I would appreciate it if you didn't make assumptions about my thoughts.

They do. Have been for years. If you haven't noticed, it's probably because you haven't been playing the right games. Quality mocap is expensive, time consuming, and graphically expensive, so the only games that can do it are big budget games with a limited number of actors, and an emphasis on cutscenes. Halo, Call of Duty, and Uncharted are probably the most obvious examples. If you've only been playing RPG or large scale adventure games, you probably wouldn't have seen high quality mocap because the exorbitant amount of money needed to do it was better spent elsewhere.

What? No game made by BioWare has ever had excellent facial animation. You likely perceive it as better only because ME1 is much farther from the uncanny valley than any more recent game.

ME1 has better face animations in general than ME3 for example. There's something they changed about the way lips move in ME3 so sad expressions kinda have a lower-jaw protrusion like in Yvonne here <- that makes it look stupid. In ME1 they desperately needed more body movement and less of those "rolleye" conversation endings (you know what I mean, right?) but there was a nice fluidity and consistency to the way faces animated despite it being very procedural. It also had great scripted moments like when Ashley blushes when you compliment her after Eden Prime without saying anything. I feel there has been increasingly many scenes in more recent BioWare games where characters move their heads in certain ways but have a blank stare while doing so, so the emotional context is somewhat lost in otherwise solid writing. They move around a lot more during scenes but faces have gotten more and more stiff and DA:I makes people look like animatronics and if not that then they spend half the conversations tilting their heads while making a "not sure if serious" look regardless of what the emotional context is.

With some of the other studios that have been brought up such as Naughty Dog, would you be willing to take the trade offs to have it more like what Uncharted is like? I am pretty sure facial customization has something to do with part of the facial animation limitations BioWare has to work with as well. So the question is would you accept a fixed protagonist to have facial animations that are similar to Uncharted 4? For me I rather have the customization and deal with the problems that gives.

Again, the uncanny valley. People in Inquisition have far more detail in their faces, so we expect them to behave more realistically. The animation in both games is probably on par with each other.

They have a system in place so all faces have the same facial animation, so that's not an issue at all. It's strictly related to the fact that there's just much, much more dialogue in a BioWare game than in a Naughty Dog game because one is a strictly linear, authored experience and the other is a non-linear "multi-authored" experience(s) because of choices. For every scene you get there could've been two other scenes at least in terms of dialogue and tone (facial expression, body language).

Now, ND did actually attempt dialogue choices with Uncharted 4 but only 2-3 times and that was early in the game and they didn't do it substantially when they did it. It was one or two different lines before a timeskip leading to the same linear conversation, but that did in fact have its own facial animations and stuff.

I think it's more relevant to compare BioWare to CDPR (as usual ) because both Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Witcher uses their own brands of procedurally generated conversation animations with some of it being performance captured.

I think Witcher 3 comes out on top except for the fact that I like that cutscenes have better pacing during the dialogue in BioWare's games after ME1. I actually thought Witcher 3 had a lot in common with ME1, moreso than any other game, but that's another topic. I would say Witcher 3 has a minimalistic but effective approach to lip-sync and I say that very modestly because the lip-animations actually reflect the spoken vowels  and syllables properly, they just have a bit of a wishy-washyness to them and in regards to eyes they can be a bit bubbly and wobbly to look at but most of the time the correct tone is there. The tech in DA:I is actually quite good, it's just not used well because I think BioWare got sloppy during their "polish" phase. There are too many instances of the emotional expression not matching the tone at all like Inquisitor smiling while you're picking an "angry fist" option and tilting his head in that awkward way.

And that's the last thing I wanna mention. Procedural face-animation is part of the system but procedural "motion-capture snippets" is also another thing. You'll see the same bodily movements repeated over the trilogy of both Witcher and Mass Effect (minus Witcher 1) and there's some overlap into Dragon Age as well.


It's because they have certain motion-captured animations in place they can reuse as many times as they want via the push of a button in their conversation toolset. Let's take a look at how this was done in ME1:


And this approach more or less applies to the other "story-driven RPG" titles of our current time, whereas Naughty Dog and other great companies are very much locked into choreographing and designing, to the tiniest detail, everything with high production value. And if you ask me, I don't think there's a way for BioWare or similar companies to achieve the same level of quality with consistency as Naughty Dog in the genre of games they're making, well... ever. 

Its hidden slightly, the word "post" in the first sentence is the link to the article.