Read About LA Noire’s Facial Animation, it’s Super-Interesting

As I’m a super-pro-gaming-journalist, I managed to get a year’s worth of UK trade magazine Develop for free.

It’s often very techy and a little inaccessible, but in this month’s issue there’s a fantastic article on the facial tech used in Rockstar’s upcoming LA: Noire. Head of Research at Depth Analysis, Oliver Boa, explains how it works:

“We sit the actors in a chair with 32 cameras around it,” he says. “It’s kind-of like doing a constant close-up, and the videos are captured in-sync. We capture the audio and body positioning at the same time with body markers so the whole performance is done in one go.”

“The 32 cameras organise into stereo pairs, so each pair works as a 3D scanner. Each take allows you to scan a patch of the head, and then by merging the 16 patches together you get a full 3D head model.

“We do quite a bit of filtering to make sure that it looks temporally smooth, and we also do quite a bit of compressing down to make sure that it fits onto our game disk. That’s quite a challenge considering that the video data rate that we get before compression is one gigabyte per second and we compress that down to one kilobyte per second for running in-game.”

It delves into the new technology used to create the scarily realistic facial animations and, in my opinion, sheds some light onto the technology that will become commonplace in the next few years.

If you can get the actual magazine I suggest you do so as it’s a great issue in itself, but you can of course read the article in full online here.