At the Creativity and Technology Conference, Zoic studios presented their project for “Killzone: Behind The Bullet”. It’s a download-able demo on the PS3 which follows the path of a bullet where gamers can control the camera angle, playback speed, and audio elements. The video renders in real time from the game engine, appealing to the gamer’s needs to see what the graphics are capable of.
To make the video, Zoic used in-game elements and animations to create the set. Taking existing assets, such as characters, lighting, and textures used to create the game and re-purposing it to create the video. The implications affect animators, who might have normally been needed to create the animation seen inside the video. If we can create content from prefabricated assets, where does that leave animators?
The video below is a regular version without input from a player.
But didn’t someone need to create the animations inside the game to begin with? Ed Ulbrich’s presentation sheds some light into new animation technologies.
Ed Ulbrich and his company, Digital Domain, were in charge of creating the special effects for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
Rather than manually animating a 3D rendering of Brad Pitt’s facial expressions as he ages, they developed a surface mapping technique to capture it. Traditionally, motion capture was done by tracking moving points on a surface. This limits to how many tiny tracking balls you can put on the actor’s face. Surface mapping involves painting the actor’s face and tracking everything at once rather than individual points, resulting in much higher resolution.
They then surface map Brad Pitt acting out 70 different facial expressions to form a database of animations. (As a side note, there’s a science to studying facial expressions called FACS.) Combining these 70 expressions creates the basis for all the animation used in the movie where the actor is aged. It’s a more efficient method than having animators capture his idiosyncrasies.
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