Heavy Rain Dev Calls L.A. Noire's MotionScan Tech a "Dead End"
- Thread starter Tom Goldman
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IMHO cage has a point where he says that capturing only face movements and capturing face AND body movements can make a world of a difference. As for whether his tech will actually be better, we'll just have to wait and see. Also did some of you miss the part where he said that LA Noir looked good? He just raised concerns that the standard set by LA noir may be abut the best that can be done with that particular method.
If their next game is like heavy rain no one will give a shit how it look like. That wasn't even a game.
He's right. On a frame-by-frame basis LA Noir characters look genuinely really ugly. You can't have normal mapping, or reflectivity (or as stated, scripted eye directions) for the yes, or 3D hair. Everything is just a video projected onto a deforming mesh by the looks of it. You get amazing animation but it is a dead end. They need to be able to have meshes and texturing that look up like you'd expect from other games.
Lol, Heavy Rain developers talking innovation. Heavy Rain has probably the worst storyline I've seen in a game. The predictability was insane and the characters were such cardboard cut-out stereotypes (Beat cop, whore with a heart etc.) that it made the game insufferable. Also you had to hold down R2 to walk and change directions with a thumbstick? What the fuck, I think quantic dreams mistook retardation for innovation with that one.
This. Thousand times this.Sylocat said:
I love Heavy Rain's graphics. I love Heavy Rain as a whole game (yes, a game. Battle sequences are solved with QTE's sure, but the rest is a game, just the interface is very different from others. What exactly makes 'push the right analog stick in a certain way to do certain action' less a game mechanic than 'press F to use', or 'left click to interact'?). It's my all time favorite.
Call me a fanboy, but I agree with him. L.A. Noire's facial animations are looking great (and Cage admits that), but even trailers can show you what he is talking about. I'm ultra hyped about L.A. Noire, because I love detective stories, and graphics, setting, EVERYTHING look damn fine so far... But if there's one studio that can 'one up' this level of graphics and animations - it's Quantic Dream... And maybe Crytek if they'll stop making things look too shiny.
Whoa whoa wait a second, "Naughty Dog, VALVe, and Pixar animate mostly by hand. No motion capture just, looking at references and moving sliders!". I don't know about the other two but I'm like 100% sure I saw motion capture on the special features of Uncharted 1 and 2The Youth Counselor said:
When I say animate mostly by hand, I meant the facial aspect. Maybe "no motion capture" shouldn't have been the best choice of word. They use limited motion capture. These three companies have a popular animator mindset that using real facial motions will limit expression and lead to the uncanny valley and the most emotional animation needs the exaggeration that only hand animation can provide.Jonesy911 said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bnru0qLBHRg#t=3m30s
First of all, you are referring to the two background characters (I'm assuming your examples are Blake and Lauren). The main characters (except from Madison, who suffered greatly from the cut out content) are better in this department. Sure, it's easy to dismiss Ethan as a 'papa wolf', or Jayden as the 'by the book' cop, but I think there's more to that in those cases. For example, the scene with Nathaniel perfectly shows how 'I'm not killing anyone' behavior can be right, but also how dangerous, and how your emotions combined with a split second decision can either save or ef up the day. Jayden's reaction to his decision in the following scene (especially in case of his moral hangover if he'll decide to pull the trigger) shapes him really well as a character. This actually brings me to my two other points, which are...Jonesy911 said:
You used two background characters to call the game on flat character stereotypes. Let me ask you - which game, movie, book or whatever has a cast made fully of original characters? Even the glorious examples of personality characterization, like Persona 4, have some. Why? Because it's impossible to make it otherwise. If you'll put 30 characters in the game, you're not going to make all of them look original, unless you're some kind of a prodigy.
And finally - you can boil down 99% of fictional characters into cardboard stereotypes. In Se7en, we have a story of a calm, veteran, 'I'm too old for this crap' cop accompanied by young, unexperienced, impulsive partner. They're both chasing a religious freak and fanatic. You have an avatar from Cowboy Bebop. That's an anime about 'cowboy' type badass with a dark past. Faye Valentine? Dirty thief, who's actually a nice person inside. Ed? A typical prodigy cloud cuckoolander. I can go on an on, but there's no need to. It's not about about original concept, it's about execution. This is the thing that made detectives Sommerset and Miles, John Doe, Spike Spiegel and the rest an awesome characters. And in my opinion, in Heavy Rain the execution is very good as well.
1. None of Heavy Rain's characters are original except maybe one. I've seen Ethan 100 times before, he's a man pushed to the edge ready to do anything to save the one thing in this world that he still loves. I've seen Jayden 100 times before, he's the most bland version of the cop with problems I've seen. The only one whose everyline of dialogue I could not predict was Shelby's and even then it was obvious exactly how his story was going to pan outYossarian1507 said:
2.There were no original set pieces. Everytime I could list movie after movie where I'd seen it done before (car compacter, strip at gun point, drowned in car, mexican stand off, driving against traffic, so on and so on)
3. You're right, 99% of fictional characters can be boiled down to stereotypes. That's why it's vital that they have strong dialogue, characterisation and peformance, 3 things that Heavy Rain lacks ("AAAAAM DI-TEK-TIV NAAAAHMAN JAAYDEN", "JASOOON? JAAYSON?")
However that's not to say Heavy Rain was all bad. I think it did well in creating a sense that this was your story by constantly bombarding you with chioces. Also, unlike most, I actually enjoyed the brutality of the QTE's. They were really effective at making you feel like victory/death was just a heartbeat away.
But it's entirely possible that I'm being overly critical, as a film student I've had to literally watch hundreds and hundreds of detective/mystery films. At this point when someone puts on a crime thriller I'm basically seeing Matrix code like I'm fucking Neo.
It's the technique behind the result. Rockstar does two takes, one of the body and one of the face, and then meshes them together, but this provides some serious hurdles to jump over, like lighting and certain adjustments and whatnot. Quantic Dream is supposedly using technology that captures both the body and the face at the same time or something like that, and that gives much more freedom to animators and developers.InsomniJack said:
By all means, the faces in Heavy Rain weren't exactly the best. It was Quantic Dream's first "next/this-gen" game, so some flaws are to be expected, but for what it is it does it fairly well.
But regardless of this mudslinging, I take this all as some friendly competition. Cage will either put up or shut up, and in the end, no matter who loses, we win with the best animation in the end (I'm an animation nut, so this is just good news all around for me).