Quite a few big stories around, the biggest obviously being that Villa Park will be in Fifa 15. Then there’s the news that Blizzard have announced the release date of the release date of the next World Of Warcraft expansion, Warlords Of Draenor. There will be an event on August 14th to announce the release date of the expansion.
Then there’s High Fidelity who are explaining their animation techniques. Inara Pey and Hamlet Au have already blogged on this but I’m going to go there too. High Fidelity have not only hired their very own version of Oz in the form of former Pixar employee Ozan Serim, they’ve also teamed Ozan (on guitar) up with another employee, Mary Poppins Emily Donald (lead vocals), to make a bold bid to win this year’s virtual world idol and based on this performance, they have to be the bookies favourite to win!
Ok ok what am I talking about you may be wondering, I wonder this often too. The issue is trying to make avatars in High Fidelity look as impressive as the do in animated movies made by the likes of Pixar, without having an animator such as Ozan Serim, who used to work at Pixar. We’re only on Wednesday and this has seemed like a very long week already, but we’ll get there, in fact we’ll just get to Ozan’s words :
One of the things I am trying to do here at HF is make live avatars look really amazing – as close to what we see in animated films today. This is a big challenge – we have to do everything in a fraction of a second without the benefits of an animator (like me!) being able to ‘post-process’ the results of what is motion captured. So I’ve been working on the ‘rigging’: how a live 3D camera and a motion capture package like Faceshift is able to ‘puppeteer’ an avatar.
The challenge of course is that in a virtual world, you’re looking at this live, whereas we all know from the outtakes from films such as Toy Story, they have more time and opportunity to put it right. Now as an example we can see Emily sing.
Now I’ve already read some criticism from others regarding this video, it doesn’t look right, the head movement is a bit weird, the eyes are a bit odd … wait that last one was me! The eyes do indeed look a bit odd, they seem to wander to areas where one isn’t expecting them to wander. However we should remember that this is all in the early stages of production and over time will undoubtedly improve.
The mouth movements do seem to be pretty much in time with the song and this is where they should utilise Emily’s talents with more challenging word based songs. Emily, who has strenuously denied that earlier in her career she carried a brolly, spoke with an English accent and sang of a spoonful of sugar should take on a song such as Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. This has many advantages, one of which is the Dick Van Dyke factor because to this very day you still can’t mention Dick Van Dyke on the Second Life forums. Therefore, if Linden Lab want Second Life discussion to be a Dick Van Dyke free zone, High Fidelity should seize the opportunity to get him onboard.
I should also point out at this stage that it probably does help greatly that Ozan is an accomplished guitarist and Emily is a bloody good singer.
The video was shot live and that makes it all the more impressive. Ozan points out some of the problems with this sort of development :
With less accurate data, we have to be clever about things like how we move the mouth to more simplistically capture the phonemes that make up speech.
Ozan also admits that they have a lot of work to do with this project :
Lots still to do, but this is fun work and clearly we are able to capture some of the emotion of a real performance.
The example does indeed capture some of the emotion of a real performance, it would also be interesting to see how the guitarist looks in a video such as this too, capturing the movements of the rest of the band would be an impressive step, but this is a project in its very early stages.
Personally I feel that at this stage people shouldn’t get too hung up on how the avatars look, but should instead be interested in how the avatars perform. How they look will improve over time, but getting the performance right early in the project would be a very positive step.
Another good example of this technology at work comes in the form of a video of Ozan lip syncing to Bohemian Rhapsody, unfortunately it doesn’t get far enough into the song to get to the headbanging stage but here we see that the mouth and even the eyebrows perform well.
At this stage I’m finding the technical development fascinating. However I should also point out that I’ve never been attracted to a game by its graphics, I still blame Dragon’s Lair for this, but for me it’s the experience, rather than the looks, that matter. However a product that performs and looks good is likely to impress me more than one that performs well alone.
Personally I think that High Fidelity are doing good things and making good progress, but we’re still quite some time away from seeing how well all the disparate parts fit together, it’s certainly an interesting product to keep one’s eye on.