Tal Peleg responsible for Cora sex scene, among other animation work.

Was about to post the same thing. Tal posted also this message on that video on Vimeo: Source:https://vimeo.com/209697041

Ignore "reports" running online that falsely claim this is "early work". Disregard screenshots that shamelessly "compare" the above work with utterly different scenes from the game. There's an unfortunate punitive campaign bent on fomenting hysteria against BioWare, and I'm not going to let my reel be used wrongly like that.

This is a typical rendition of what animators showcase in dailies or weeklies.

The fact it's not from in-engine is to strictly illustrate the raw animation as seen in Maya, the animation software that the vast majority of the industry is using. This is not an uncommon practice to showcase, specifically for animators.

All work presented incorporates:

1) All hand key facial animation
2) heavy hand keyframing work on top of crude body mocap
3) Camera design and animation
4) Editing
5) Cora Romance scene exertion audio mixing

Specifically for the Cora scene, the actors on stage were very reserved and did not engage in the same manner as you can see in the animation. All the extra nuances of performances (including enhanced physical and facial actions) were animated after the motion capture shoot.

My work on MEA amounts to an incredibly small percentage. It's been a refreshing experience working with such a positive, friendly team. There are too many talented people involved making the game and the scenes above, but I'd like to thank Ken Thain and Tim Golem (Cine Director / Lead Cine Anim) for entrusting me with incredible creative rein on my tasks, even though I had joined relatively late in production.

-Tal

So these were the raw animations so I guess the problem with them lies within the Frostbite engine itself and the procedural animated approach that BW used.

So uh, can they hire him back to redo most of the game's animations lol?

What cosplay does he do?

Without a doubt, I believe BioWare Montreal will use his talents exhaustively going forward. Peleg clearly has quite the experience and background dealing with high quality animation work on big AAA projects. He was only at BioWare Montreal for a brief period of time and his results are absolutely stunning. Imagine what he could have done had he been involved in the project from the very start.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see a massive increase in animation fidelity with the inevitable DLC.

While that would be nice, as well as probably unrealistic, I think his work illustrates a bright future for animation going forward at BioWare Montreal. With what little he touched, there was a noticeable spike in animation quality, compared to everything else.

Agreed. That small attention to detail is what makes the scene believable and impactful. The problem with much of the game is the animations are bland or just downright wonky. There is no polish and the detail is largely lacking. If we had animation quality at this level for everything in MEA, the game would have been praised for its animation work. At the very least, I believe this paints a bright future for MEA DLC and future games.

Yep. EA pushed it back as far as they were willing. It was going to come out one way or another.

DICE has always done a great job with facial animation work with Frostbite, so I figured BioWare Montreal had to be at fault for not properly using the engine and the tools to get quality results. No idea what the new IP will look like. But, at the very least, I think BioWare will be motivated to create the best DLC it ever has in order to restore consumer confidence. EA Play will be a bit time for BioWare to step up and show the world why they are still one of the best RPG developers in the business.

I think I must be missing something.  So people are saying the one scene in the game that has decent animations, was done by an outside person that it is 'unrealistic' to think he will be hired. Yet there is great hope going forward that Bioware will get their act together.   How is that going to happen if they don't hire people who know how to do it correctly?  Ahhhh space magic ok

Tal Peleg, the hero we deserve.

Without a doubt Tal Peleg's work is amazing on animation, but for those saying he should be animating a lot more that's not how animation in a game like Mass Effect works.

With Naughty Dog and games like Uncharted, they can put that level of animation in because it's a significantly short game that is linear. They don't have to account for all the player choice in dialogue, all the side quest dialogue, etc. They just have to do a few hours of cutscenes and then some combat animations. It's still a lot of work, but it's not nearly as much as it would be if BioWare were to use that approach.

What developers like BioWare, Bethesda, and CDPR have to do is build a library of re-usable animations and other things like head tracking that are constantly being used by the game during cutscenes. They then go in and animate a few cutscenes in the Naughty Dog way for ones that they deem important. Why Cora's sex scene was deemed so important over other things(maybe it wasn't and this is just Tal's expertise shining though), I'm not sure but that's one of the things that clearly got the "animated by hand" treatment.

It doesn't look as good but when you do it right it still works. CDPR is probably the best at it, and The Witcher 3 still arguably doesn't have amazing animations except in the context of looking at how they've overcome certain usual limitations of this system. There's a reason why characters looking stiff when they're talking to you have been a criticism of both past BioWare and Bethesda games.

At a guess, I would say that the problem lies somewhere in that system. Either animations not playing the right animation or at all, some of the other parts of it not working, or a combination of multiple things.

As to why it ended up happening, nothing we say is anything but speculation honestly.

Well that certainly explained why the scene was so well done.

Well, my point was he probably would have been involved in more cutscenes that he could have helped animate. Without a doubt, one man wasn't going to completely fix what was obviously a managerial breakdown in terms of animation quality control. I shutter to think what the Cora sex scene would have looked like without him being involved.

The main obstacle to BioWare competing with CDPR is the latter put a lot of capital into creating adaptable tools for fast and ambitious development in TW3. CDPR created a foundation that was custom built and tailored for TW3, such as the entirety of RED Engine 3. I remember an article a few months back from the lead animator on Blood and Wine, and CDPR literally had a handful of guys (most of CDPR was already working on Cyberpunk 2077) do all the new animations for that massive expansion. He credited the success to CDPR's unrivaled tools streamlining and expediting the process.

BioWare doesn't have that same luxury considering they use the same engine that everybody at EA uses now. That's not to say that BioWare can't try and create a better infrastructure to have more dependable tools that don't require as much iteration and polish. But, trying to compare anything to CDPR is always difficult given that studio's unique position and free will.

I'd say animation quality in the OT and DAI were rather flat and limited. I think MEA was meant as a preliminary step to provide more emotion in facial animations. Unfortunately, BioWare didn't take the time and effort to actually polish and detail those animations. While MEA certainly has quite a few wonky expressions, it also has some of the best animation work out of any BioWare title to date.

He would have gotten some more cutscenes to look better, but it wouldn't have fixed the biggest issues with the system like Addison's infamous "my face is tired" scene. Cora's scene probably would have been passable without him because it was one of the animated by hand scenes, just not as well done as it looks with him.

Issues like Sara smiling at everything are issues with the procedural animation system, and they aren't things that people like Tal are going to go in and fix by hand. The animations could have used a bit more polish but the biggest issue by far is either the wrong animation playing at the wrong time, or no animation playing at all in the case of a lot of the eye movements.

BioWare has those adaptable tools as well, theirs just aren't as good as what CDPR used for The Witcher 3. The main thing CDPR did was expand their tools so that characters don't look as stiff during cutscenes anymore, which is something neither BioWare nor Bethesda have done. That's why the OT and DA:I can look flat, because they're using the non-expanded tools.

That's why I said BioWare should take a look at what they did.