Star Wars, Whedon, and Facial Animation
I got to go see Star Wars episode III: Revenge of the Sith again this weekend. That opening sequence still blows me away. If I do a sequel to Void War, I'm going to have big ol' fleet battles going on like that. Those always thrill me, be it the big space battle in Return of the Jedi, or the big fleet battle(s) against the Borg in Star Trek, or Babylon 5's amazingly close-quarters capital ship combat, or the fleet battles in Freespace 2 (with those wonderful ship-killer beam weapons). It's just too cool visually to be a gnat dodging around in the midst of a battle of titans.

Anyway - I decided I really do like the movie. I expected the dialog to grate more the second time, or to have more trouble buying Anakin's descent to the dark side (I did, but I still found it forgiveable). But I still felt it kicked my butt enough stand proudly alongside the original trilogy.

In other news, my wifed managed to score tickets for the single showing of the preview of Joss Whedon's "Serenity" next week! Assuming we can find a babysitter for that late at night, I will be one happy camper. Assuming it does not dissapoint. From the trailer, it looks like it's got a big ol' Giant Fleet Battle in space, too. With the firefly hurtling Millenium Falcon-style amidst other ships. Man, o, man. I hope the movie is good. I know that the special effects and music won't be done for this version, but I'm anxious to see the characters again. I've missed them, and the thirteen - or - so episodes on DVD just wasn't enough time to spend with 'em.

This weekend I got to spend more time on the new game. There will be NO big space-fleet battles in it, I'm afraid. My focus this weekend was on animation - learning the tools, getting them imported into Torque, and calling them from inside Torque. My big focus this week is on facial animation. I'm not going to try and go beyond cartoon-style emoting in this game, but facial animation and having something vaguely resembling lip-synching for the few cutscenes with voice-overs would be nice. (No, I still can't afford union talent for the voice-overs... not that I was one to worry about the game selling over 400,000 units...) I'm basically needing to wire up a head with controls for eyelids (or use texture-swapping to do them wide-open, half-closed, and closed), eyebrow movement, and mouth control. Maybe making the eyes move and dart around a bit. If anyone has a link to some tutorials / articles about how to do good facial animation for real-time games, please let me know.

In my little quest for knowledge I've looked at some professional models from other games. It's amazing to me how good the pros can make a model look with so few polygons. Perfectly created polygons, just exactly the right texturing. Wow. You guys amaze me. We programmers have to work so hard sometimes to make such incremental improvements in the visual quality of our games. The real heroes are the artists (all the guys doing visual content), who can make it all come alive and make it LOOK easy.

Aside from pretending to be an artist, I got to do some programmer stuff, which isn't nearly as sexy. Mainly I'm just scripting in some behaviors, creation and destruction of dynamic objects, linking in the Advanced Camera code, playing around with light behaviors, etc. Nothing much to write home about, and kind of embarassingly little progress for three weeks of development (hey, when you work a fourteen hour day at the day job, it's hard to find time or motivation to get cracking on code when you get home). But it's all little pieces that will hopefully fit together nicely in the near future.
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 9:22 AM (Permalink)