Bioware character creation always has the worst looking hairs. I don't know how they manage to fuck them up so consistently.
Is it just me or does it look unpolished? The lip sync looks really 'floaty' and the way the dialogue is said sounds so... Unnatural.
[QUOTE=Kinky Pie;51906958]Is it just me or does it look unpolished? The lip sync looks really 'floaty' and the way the dialogue is said sounds so... Unnatural.[/QUOTE]
Probably from the buggy cut they gave to the big sites.
Why is lip syncing still so horrible in the vast majority of games today? It's the one thing that hasn't improved even slightly over the last decade.
[QUOTE=Kinky Pie;51906958]Is it just me or does it look unpolished? The lip sync looks really 'floaty' and the way the dialogue is said sounds so... Unnatural.[/QUOTE]
you know the lip sync actually looks a lot better then the ones in that mess defect video
[editline]4th March 2017[/editline]
ok maybe except the one in 11:59
[QUOTE=DOG-GY;51906968]Why is lip syncing still so horrible in the vast majority of games today? It's the one thing that hasn't improved even slightly over the last decade.[/QUOTE]
It's especially unforgivable when facial mocap has been a viable solution for a long time. I don't get why devs belonging to big companies like EA refuse to use it.
That asari had a weird visual bug
[t]http://i.imgur.com/rZh0I7Q.png[/t]
as if the Ogre similarity wasn't bad enough
[t]http://akimg1.ask.fm/assets2/141/076/416/256/normal/file.jpg[/t]
I get a horrible feeling this game has been rushed. There are gifs from trailers and gameplay where the animations are so half-assed - like quality testing wasn't even a part of the process.
[img]http://68.media.tumblr.com/b970d5132fe1fcbf05fd4dbce88bc78d/tumblr_olycxgTChG1qzm8mpo1_540.gif[/img]
How do you miss something like this? Or rather see it and go "yeah it's fine, release it".
[QUOTE=Kinky Pie;51906958]Is it just me or does it look unpolished? The lip sync looks really 'floaty' and the way the dialogue is said sounds so... Unnatural.[/QUOTE]
Bioware has gone downhill ever sinced they decided to actually hire fan fiction writers.
[quote]Mass Effect: Andromeda was built using EA DICE's Frostbite 3 engine, which required that BioWare construct all systems, tools, and assets from scratch as the series was previously built on Epic Games' Unreal Engine.[58] BioWare tried to push the boundaries of the software, particularly in the area of character animation, which Mac Walters felt was at an "all-time high".[/quote]
Also lol from the wikipedia article.
For a game coming out in 2017 it sure does look old. For a spaceship the light looks very boring. The art direction just looks like they didn't try. And the characters, my god. I could handle okay environments and light but for a space opera the characters look and movie just horribly. None of the animations in cutscenes seem natural to me. They're all strangely janky and robotic. Their mouths seem to move independently of rest of facial emotions which makes them stand out in an unnatural way. I have no idea how they could fuck up this bad.
It's like the whole project is an intern spinoff.
[QUOTE=The Party Spy;51907073]That asari had a weird visual bug
[t]http://i.imgur.com/rZh0I7Q.png[/t]
[/QUOTE]
[T]http://sciolyte.com/sharex/chrome_2017-03-03_20-02-47.png[/T]
[QUOTE=DOG-GY;51906968]Why is lip syncing still so horrible in the vast majority of games today? It's the one thing that hasn't improved even slightly over the last decade.[/QUOTE]
Lip syncing requires a shitload of time spent fine tuning to get it to look decent, RPGs just have way too much dialog for any reasonably sized development team to make it look any good. Even RPGs that are considered to look really good like The Witcher 3 still have laughable lip syncing in comparison to movies or linear games.
[QUOTE=l337k1ll4;51907195]Lip syncing requires a shitload of time spent fine tuning to get it to look decent, RPGs just have way too much dialog for any reasonably sized development team to make it look any good. Even RPGs that are considered to look really good like The Witcher 3 still have laughable lip syncing in comparison to movies or linear games.[/QUOTE]
Here's an oooold example of how you can do this quite easily.
If you look at Conker's Bad Fur Day's file selection screen you can see the band syncs itself up with the audio perfectly. They do this by having cues built into the audio trigger keyframes. They mention this in the Conker dev commentary:
[url]https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbRUl7dkRVPKlYiUq4TmEaQ/videos[/url]
Really good watch, would recommend.
IIRC Half Life 2 uses the same sort of system and it looks beautiful today, though somewhat unrefined. With all the modern tech such as blendshapes this kind of implementation would be relatively trivial.
[QUOTE=l337k1ll4;51907195]Lip syncing requires a shitload of time spent fine tuning to get it to look decent, RPGs just have way too much dialog for any reasonably sized development team to make it look any good. Even RPGs that are considered to look really good like The Witcher 3 still have laughable lip syncing in comparison to movies or linear games.[/QUOTE]
Companies treat it like an afterthought a lot of the time and, while it's disappointing, it shouldn't be neglected to the state of looking like this.
[QUOTE=DOG-GY;51907241]Here's an oooold example of how you can do this quite easily.
If you look at Conker's Bad Fur Day's file selection screen you can see the band syncs itself up with the audio perfectly. They do this by having cues built into the audio trigger keyframes. They mention this in the Conker dev commentary:
[URL]https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbRUl7dkRVPKlYiUq4TmEaQ/videos[/URL]
Really good watch, would recommend.
IIRC Half Life 2 uses the same sort of system and it looks beautiful today, though somewhat unrefined. With all the modern tech such as blendshapes this kind of implementation would be relatively trivial.[/QUOTE]
That's exactly how games like Mass Effect work too, virtually all games use the same type of lip sync system, and I'm not sure why you think HL2 and Conker have good lip sync but this doesn't, because those are plainly at least as bad, or worse, it's only excusable because of how old they are.
The problem is that there's only so far algorithms like that can take you, there's way too much subtlety to the human face to be able to automate it anytime soon. Maybe when we have some seriously advanced AI to do this kind of thing sure, but it's not happening anytime soon. Until that day, the only way to lipsync is to either use automated phoneme interpretation or facial mocap, both of which look like ass until you spend dozens or hundreds of man hours per scene refining it. In a linear game or movie that doesn't have that many scenes to begin with, that's easy, in an RPG with so much dialog, it's pretty much impossible.
[QUOTE=l337k1ll4;51907290]That's exactly how games like Mass Effect work too, virtually all games use the same type of lip sync system, and I'm not sure why you think HL2 and Conker have good lip sync but this doesn't, because those are plainly just as bad if not worse, it's only excusable because of how old they are.[/QUOTE]
Then why do they sync perfectly despite being over a decade old and this can't manage to get close? Witcher 3 [I]never[/I] syncs nor does any Mass Effect.
Just because the animation isn't good compared to today doesn't mean the tech isn't working better.
[editline]3rd March 2017[/editline]
[QUOTE=l337k1ll4;51907290]The problem is that there's only so far algorithms like that can take you, there's way too much subtlety to the human face to be able to automate it anytime soon. Maybe when we have some seriously advanced AI to do this kind of thing sure, but it's not happening anytime soon. Until that day, the only way to lipsync is to either use automated phoneme interpretation or facial mocap, both of which look like ass until you spend dozens of man hours per scene refining it.[/QUOTE]
This is why you use blendshapes, like I mentioned.
[QUOTE=DOG-GY;51907303]Then why do they sync perfectly despite being over a decade old and this can't manage to get close? Witcher 3 [I]never[/I] syncs nor does any Mass Effect.
Just because the animation isn't good compared to today doesn't mean the tech isn't working better.
[editline]3rd March 2017[/editline]
This is why you use blendshapes, like I mentioned.[/QUOTE]
They don't sync perfectly, you're just wearing rose tinted glasses, take a closer look and try to look past nostalgia of how good they looked compared to the competition when they came out, neither HL2 nor Conker's Bad Fur day have aged well, the animations are some of the worst parts of those games.
[editline]3rd March 2017[/editline]
[QUOTE=DOG-GY;51907303]This is why you use blendshapes, like I mentioned.[/QUOTE]
They obviously already do...
[QUOTE=Silverlan;51907163][T]http://sciolyte.com/sharex/chrome_2017-03-03_20-02-47.png[/T][/QUOTE]
[t]http://i.imgur.com/swuPKF1.jpg[/t]
Inconspicuous.
And what the fuck is up with sound mixing/voice editing at 5:43 and 6:05, what the fuck?
[QUOTE=l337k1ll4;51907316]They don't sync perfectly, you're just wearing rose tinted glasses, take a closer look and try to look past nostalgia of how good they looked compared to the competition when they came out, neither HL2 nor Conker's Bad Fur day have aged well, the animations are some of the worst parts of those games.[/QUOTE]
Show me the desync then.
[QUOTE=l337k1ll4;51907316]They obviously already do...[/QUOTE]
Well duh. So then what's the problem getting clean sync and lifelike animation?
[QUOTE=l337k1ll4;51907316]They don't sync perfectly, you're just wearing rose tinted glasses, take a closer look and try to look past nostalgia of how good they looked compared to the competition when they came out, neither HL2 nor Conker's Bad Fur day have aged well, the animations are some of the worst parts of those games.
[editline]3rd March 2017[/editline]
They obviously already do...[/QUOTE]
i'm in the middle of a half life 2 playthrough and you're wrong
[QUOTE=DOG-GY;51907369]Show me the desync then.
Well duh. So then what's the problem getting clean sync and lifelike animation?[/QUOTE]
What do you mean show it to you? Look at it yourself, it's blatantly obvious, there's no subtlety whatsoever, the mouths basically move up and down and not much else.
The problem is that using phonemes isn't enough to gather data. Morph targets aren't an end all be all magic ticket to good animation, it still takes skill to animate with them. Just because Pixar makes them look good through thousands of hours of effort doesn't mean they'll look good when you animate them with an algorithm and call it a day.
I'm not saying this looks acceptable, Bioware exclusively makes RPGs, they should have more animators than just about any other position at the company, I don't disagree that they should put more work into it, what I'm saying is that if you expect RPGs to look like linear story games like Until Dawn, or look like a Disney or Pixar movie, you just need to get realistic. All Pixar movies look like this at some point in time, the difference is about 1000 animators and 4 years of time and an unlimited amount of money being spent on something that has about 1/10th of the total amount of animation. You can't expect an RPG to look like a movie as far as animation is concerned, not as long as the company making them needs to not go bankrupt at least.
[QUOTE=l337k1ll4;51907195]Lip syncing requires a shitload of time spent fine tuning to get it to look decent, RPGs just have way too much dialog for any reasonably sized development team to make it look any good. Even RPGs that are considered to look really good like The Witcher 3 still have laughable lip syncing in comparison to movies or linear games.[/QUOTE]
What? Laughable? The Witcher 3 has probably [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baynD1fbb90]the best lip syncing[/url] on the market right now, it's better than almost every linear game I've played. Sometimes the mouth can look off but that's due to the shape of the model, and it only happens on a few select models. And for a game that has probably more dialogue than entire game series while managing to look convincing that's damn good.
That video doesn't lip sync at all Kinky.
[QUOTE=Kinky Frog;51907468]What? Laughable? The Witcher 3 has probably [URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baynD1fbb90"]the best lip syncing[/URL] on the market right now, it's better than almost every linear game I've played. Sometimes the mouth can look off but that's due to the shape of the model, and it only happens on a few select models. And for a game that has probably more dialogue than entire game series while managing to look convincing that's damn good.[/QUOTE]
I'm not insulting the Witcher 3 by any means because it's far and away my favorite game of all time, but compare the facial animation to an actual person reading those lines and then tell me it looks pretty much as good.
[QUOTE=l337k1ll4;51907396]What do you mean show it to you? Look at it yourself, it's blatantly obvious, there's no subtlety whatsoever, the mouths basically move up and down and not much else.[/QUOTE]
Not true. Watched videos before posting to not speak from my butt. Conker syncs which they brag about in the dev commentary. Gman, at least, syncs despite animation being bad.
[QUOTE=l337k1ll4;51907396]The problem is that using phonemes isn't enough to gather data. Morph targets aren't an end all be all magic ticket to good animation, it still takes skill to animate with them. Just because Pixar makes them look good through thousands of hours of effort doesn't mean they'll look good when you animate them with an algorithm and call it a day.
I'm not saying this looks acceptable, Bioware exclusively makes RPGs, they should have more animators than just about any other position at the company, I don't disagree that they should put more work into it, what I'm saying is that if you expect RPGs to look like linear story games like Until Dawn, or look like a Disney or Pixar movie, you just need to get realistic. All Pixar movies look like this at some point in time, the difference is about 1000 animators and 4 years of time and an unlimited amount of money being spent on something that has about 1/10th of the total amount of animation. You can't expect an RPG to look like a movie as far as animation is concerned, not as long as the company making them needs to not go bankrupt at least.[/QUOTE]
I'm not saying to use phonemes as raw animation drivers, I'm suggesting to hand sync via cues embedded in the audio files which will look correct in engine. It takes time but not "1000 animators and 4 years" lmao. It will never desync under normal circumstances because it's triggered via audio, like Conker and HL2. In this case even if there's a hitch it will pick itself back up again rather than fall behind entirely, something you can see in the Witcher 3. I've watched W3 catch a hitch during dialog before and it may surprise you to find that the entire dialog animation continues to play out rather than interpolate from cues, while audio lags behind by at least half a second. They clearly don't use tech to sync.
Didn't say a peep about Pixar or Disney or linear games, the latter of which suffer the same problems occasionally. These are unfair comparisons that I'm not making.
[QUOTE=DOG-GY;51907581]Not true. Watched videos before posting to not speak from my butt. Conker syncs which they brag about in the dev commentary. Gman, at least, syncs despite animation being bad.
I'm not saying to use phonemes as raw animation drivers, I'm suggesting to hand sync via cues embedded in the audio files which will look correct in engine. It takes time but not "1000 animators and 4 years" lmao. It will never desync under normal circumstances because it's triggered via audio, like Conker and HL2. In this case even if there's a hitch it will pick itself back up again rather than fall behind entirely, something you can see in the Witcher 3. I've watched W3 catch a hitch during dialog before and it may surprise you to find that the entire dialog animation continues to play out rather than interpolate from cues, while audio lags behind by at least half a second. They clearly don't use tech to sync.
Didn't say a peep about Pixar or Disney or linear games, the latter of which suffer the same problems occasionally. These are unfair comparisons that I'm not making.[/QUOTE]
We're not talking about mouth movements matching up to the words in time, we're talking about how lifelike those animations look.
[QUOTE=l337k1ll4;51907586]We're not talking about mouth movements matching up to the words in time, we're talking about how lifelike those animations look.[/QUOTE]
Then I don't understand because I was talking about sync in the first place and clarified this every post. Why do you insist on talking about realism when I never intended to?
I even go so far as to give an example of how to keep this realism while maintaining sync, by utilizing the same blendshapes and key poses and interpolating between them via audio triggers, and you just said "These games use blendshapes already." Like yeah no shit, that doesn't mean they're synced to anything which was the root of the discussion.
[QUOTE=DOG-GY;51907606]Then I don't understand because I was talking about sync in the first place and clarified this every post. Why do you insist on talking about realism when I never intended to?
I even go so far as to give an example of how to keep this realism while maintaining sync, by utilizing the same blendshapes and key poses and interpolating between them via audio triggers, and you just said "These games use blendshapes already." Like yeah no shit, that doesn't mean they're synced to anything which was the root of the discussion.[/QUOTE]
You said the game had bad lip sync, that term doesn't just purely mean how things line up in a timeline, lip sync includes the quality of the animation as well. I've never in my life heard someone use the term lip sync to mean something as specific as you did.
[QUOTE=l337k1ll4;51907642]You said the game had bad lip sync, that term doesn't just purely mean how things line up in a timeline, lip sync includes the quality of the animation as well. I've never in my life heard someone use the term lip sync to mean something as specific as you did.[/QUOTE]
That is exactly what lip sync means mate.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.
