Once we go through the capture process we need to go through the performance analysis process." A VO booth scenario - you capture video of the performance at the same time you capture the audio. Said Barton, the first was called "performance capture. The animation pipeline involved a number of steps. "We did have a sign off procedure from the high level developers at Rockstar pretty early off." That procedure worked through a number of concurrent pipelines to ensure the client was satisfied with the end result. "The question is, when is a rig final? I guess never is definitely the answer," stated David Barton. Said the tech director, "As we move on the project we have 15 or 20 finished characters we can choose from, and rig transfer is very useful from this time." The rig transfer takes the master rig from one head and transfers it to any consecutive heads. If Rockstar changed the design a bit, we'd just have to clean up a bit and we'd still have a finished character."Ī key component to the projects success was the company's "rig transfer" technology. Noted Mastilovic, "Because of the scale of this project we had to have rigs finished before we started animating, but because it's all rigged on the timeline we could change the base mesh and we wouldn't have to re-skin. GTA IV's scale apparently caused issues at times. In my mind these rigs could contain more emotion and can be further iterated." Here technologies director Vladimir Mastilovic spoke up, saying, "I just want to explain why we have so many expressions - it's because we have to match the actor's performance very closely. They showed the difference in rigged and unrigged characters by having them approach the camera, activate their joints, continue to walk, and then deactivate as they walked away. A model of Bellic's head was shown, with the individual joints working. and you need a great 3D rig, a great facial model."Īt this point the Image Metrics staffers showed off a demo of GTA's protagonist Niko Bellic, and other characters from the game. He continued, "The key of it is how you breathe life into these characters, and our way of doing it is to capture the performance of the actor, it's all based on the performance. Facial rigs in the game had something on the order of 100 individual joints, and over the course of the game "there are 300 minutes of facial animation" according to Barton. That relationship no doubt solved a number of scale problems, as GTA IV posted some daunting challenges. We know what we need to make animation look great but we need you guys to help with that." He stated, "We've worked with Rockstar Games for a number of years now and the only reason I mention that is if you're going to build a pipeline like this, it helps if you have that relationship. Image Metrics' solution, as recently showcased by Popular Mechanics, is to " all aspects of a face’s motion (including eyes and lips, which are difficult to attach markers to)", and then ".automatically map that motion to a template character."īarton was upfront about the importance of communication even during what might - from appearances - be a purely technical relationship. How can you animate the eyes if you can't put any markers on them?" It's problematic.
Keyframing is possible as well, but you've got to have a hell of a good animator and it's going to take a really long time, and for a project on the scale of GTA it's probably not even possible."ĭirect motion capture is always an option, but Barton noted that making realistic characters "always comes back to the eyes. Said Barton, "It gives a level of realism that is difficult and time consuming to keyframe. To clarify the history of the capture medium, the production head analyzed the history of the process, noting that performance-driven animation actually dates back to rotoscoping, or tracing, live actor performances. Barton was fairly straightforward: "Our task was, 'How to bring him to life? How can we make him move?'" The 'him' in question was GTA IV protagonist Niko Bellic. To share information about the process of applying their technologies to the characters in Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV, head of production David Barton and technical director Vladimir Mastilovic spoke at the Microsoft Gamefest event earlier this week.
Image Metrics is a technology firm working with companies like Vivendi, Activision, and Epic Games to produce "high-fidelity, performance-driven facial animation" through a combination of performance capture and animation refining.