Why is Bethesda so bad at making faces?

[F4LL3N]

I have to agree. It was impossible for me to make a nice face in Oblivion. I would have preferred to use a nice looking pre-made face than use the horrible faces that darn character editor made.

Skyrim looks better. Hopefully I can make a beautiful looking female character or atleast a half decent male character.

 

[Stall]

Bethesda is bad at a lot of things. Their other areas of badness are eclipse their inability to make a decent model.

 

[badgersprite]

You DO realize that it's very difficult to make and animate a face so it looks nice,right? The face is a very complex structure,and to make a believable (one that doesn't fall into the Uncanny Valley) face,through animation,modelling,and skinning,takes a LOT of work,resources,and reference work.

Yeah, this was going to be my response too. Basically, you have two options when it comes to faces being rendered workably in a way that doesn't overtax the system: make them look cartoony like they were just drawn on or taken from a mannequin, or try to make them look "realistic" (read: ugly). Especially when you can walk up and talk to any NPC in the world and zoom in on their face, you have to put effort into making them all look different within the in-game mechanics. In Bethesda's case, that tends to involve giving them varying degrees of ugliness.

 

[inFAMOUSCowZ]

I have to say that Skyrim looks like the faces will be great. The whole new animation set looks great.

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

I think a lot of games suck at faces and facial animations. It isn't especially easy to get right.

 

[unoleian]

This thread reminded me of this! Thanks OP!

Spoiler

I had no idea it was possible to abuse the face-gen tool in Oblivion to that kind of extreme effect. It's actually kind of fascinating.

 

[Mr. Omega]

1: This is a problem a lot of game studios have. Especially those that try to make realistic human faces.

2: Bethesda has much bigger problems than their faces. Faces are very low on Bethesda's "Problems we have that we should fix this" list.

 

[the spud]

It's probably got something to do with the fact that Oblivion and Morrowind both had around a thousand unique NPC's to animate and Bethesda's games are usually poorly optimized.

 

[SwagLordYoloson]

I will always prefer morrowinds design, purely because of the fantasy involved with the game. Giant Mushrooms and the like. And this stands for the Face's too, the simplistic design of the faces were far better than Oblivion's

 

[SirCannonFodder]

The problem wasn't the tech. It's just very poor design.
HL2 and VTM came before Oblivion and had much better faces and animation.

You also might have noticed that they had an absolutely tiny fraction of the number of faces Oblivion had (HL2 had what, 25, 30 faces total? And VTMB wasn't much better), so it's not surprising really surprising they'd be able to put more effort into each one.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

You DO realize that it's very difficult to make and animate a face so it looks nice,right? The face is a very complex structure,and to make a believable (one that doesn't fall into the Uncanny Valley) face,through animation,modelling,and skinning,takes a LOT of work,resources,and reference work.

Doesn't help when the 3rd party lipsyncing tools you use require certain set ups that almost always ends up making women look like they've got mustaches or badly done reco surgery on a hare lip.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

I defy anyone to look at the beautiful carrots in Oblivion and claim that Bethesda doesn't know where people want their polygons!

Hot damn, those are some beautiful carrots. Who really cares about 'faces'?

You installed the 'gardening gloves' mod so you could plant carrots all over Tamriel, didn't you?

 

[DementedSheep]

Possibly because they have allot of NPCs so they don?t really put allot of effort into each face since it would take to much time. I agree that they are terrible and it?s not a tech limitation because there mods out there that it much better.

 

[Racecarlock]

In the immortal abridged catchphrase of Ishizu Ishtar: "Because shut up."

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well we may not notice but we are extremely fine tuned and picky when it comes to faces because we have been observing them all our lives and learned to read a story out of every ever so minute twitch.

Which makes modeling of faces extremely difficult, i.e. you need a specialist to do it, the average terrain and building guys may do a decent job but faces without a very fine degree of tuning will always look horribly wrong.

 

[veloper]

The problem wasn't the tech. It's just very poor design.
HL2 and VTM came before Oblivion and had much better faces and animation.

You also might have noticed that they had an absolutely tiny fraction of the number of faces Oblivion had (HL2 had what, 25, 30 faces total? And VTMB wasn't much better), so it's not surprising really surprising they'd be able to put more effort into each one.

That means that what Beth should have done is make a couple dozen good faces to choose from and then vary the colors and the hairstyles and beards. Better to have more of something good than a truckload of different kinds of shit.

 

[veloper]

The problem wasn't the tech. It's just very poor design.
HL2 and VTM came before Oblivion and had much better faces and animation.

You also might have noticed that they had an absolutely tiny fraction of the number of faces Oblivion had (HL2 had what, 25, 30 faces total? And VTMB wasn't much better), so it's not surprising really surprising they'd be able to put more effort into each one.

That means that what Beth should have done is make a couple dozen good faces to choose from and then vary the colors and the hairstyles and beards. Better to have more of something good than a truckload of different kinds of shit.

 

[TheGuyWithThatHair]

Its because theres so many characters in Bethesda games, they can't spend a load of time and budget on making every single one beautiful. I also think the way they present the characters, stock still and looking straight at you doesn't help either.

 

[Axolotl]

The problem wasn't the tech. It's just very poor design.
HL2 and VTM came before Oblivion and had much better faces and animation.

Yeah but to be fair they have better faces and animation than everyone.

I think it is just because they don't see it as a priority and it's something that is very hard to do. It's probable NPC interation simply isn't viewed as very important by Bethesda, just look at the voice acting and dialog for futher proof of this. It clearly was important for Valve and Troika and that's part of what makes Half Life 2 and Bloodlines such great games.

 

[Jennacide]

The problem wasn't the tech. It's just very poor design.
HL2 and VTM came before Oblivion and had much better faces and animation.

They also used newer and better built engines. Oblivion is run on a hotwired version of Gamebryo, the same engine they powered Morrowind with, and it was built originally back in late 1999. Source was built from the ground up by Valve with a major focus on doing proper faces, Gamebryo was built as an all purpose engine for doing just about anything you wanted.

Skyrim looks to resolve the durpy faces and need for face modding, which is a good thing. Learning to use WyreBash was one of the worst aspects of playing Oblivion.