Solothores
Loyal Freddie
- Joined
- Dec 23, 2003
- Messages
- 55
- Thread starter
- #91
Found this Interview regarding Emotion FX2 involving John van der Burg, from Mystic Game Development (Fear the Dutch \o/)
EMotion FX 2 Gives Games a Face-Lift
by Louis Bedigian
Mystic Game Development has given RPG developers what they need most: lifelike emotions.
Even with today’s advanced technology, there’s one thing that all games lack: believable facial expressions. I’m not talking about gasps, smiles or laughter. Game artists have done that stuff pretty well. But when it comes to conveying a deep emotion – either of love, of hate, or of trauma – the game industry falls flat on its face. In story and in music they can and have succeeded. But never once have I felt the emotion in a video game character’s face because it just isn’t there. To be honest, it’s not there in any of the CG movies featured in games either.
Will it ever change? At this point no one knows for sure. But there are a few dedicated souls out there who hope that it will change very soon. One of those souls is Mystic Game Development. They sound like a producer of role-playing games, but in actuality they make spectacular game engines.
Their latest, the EMotion FX 2, has serious potential. Only demo shots have been revealed thus far, but take a look at what this thing is capable of producing:
Her snarl, her sneer, her look of anger – it’s impeccable. It looks closer to a CG movie than a video game.
And this is only the beginning. As you’ll discover in this interview, the EMotion FX 2 is being used to create some of some of the most astonishing effects you’ll see in a game.
Please tell our readers what you guys do and what your company, Mystic Game Development, is all about.
John van der Burg, Development Director: Mystic Game Development is a game technology middleware company, which means we work on products that game companies can use inside their games. EMotion FX 2 is our latest product, which is a real-time character animation system. We specialized in this field to provide game developer with an advanced and flexible character animation system to take their in-game characters to the next level. Besides that it of course also saves them a lot of development time and risk.
We aim to provide cutting edge tools to make the next generation of games more compelling, more addictive and more real.
Tell us how the technology works. What level of control does it give to game developers?
JVDB: Basically EMotion FX 2 allows artist to create characters and motions in 3D Studio Max or Maya, which can then be exported into custom file formats that our SDK can read. Once this data is loaded, the game can display the characters, while EMotion FX 2 performs all the motions on the body and face. EMotion FX 2 takes care of all the transitions between different motions and mixing of different motions at the same time. Next to this we provide a set of Inverse Kinematics solvers, which can be very useful when the characters have to aim guns, grab objects or when the feet have to be placed on the surface below the character. Another important feature of EMotion FX 2 is high quality facial animation and lipsync. There are many other features as well, too many to mention here. It is the best for people to have a look at our website's feature list. Developers get full control on the character. They can control it at very high level, but can also dive so deep into the API that they can write custom interpolation, collision or blending routines or adjust keyframing data.
“I’ll get that Lara Croft, I swear! Even if it’s the last thing I do!”
The EMotion FX 2 looks very expansive. Just how far can game developers go with thing? What level of realism can be reached?
JVDB: EMotion FX 2 has a different design from most other real-time animation systems we have seen. Our animation system needs to be usable in any type of game. Also it needs to be very flexible to be sure that we can add new features to it very easily. Also EMotion FX 2 is very modular, which allows people to replace specific components if they don’t suit their needs. If something is not possible to achieve with EMotion FX 2 as it ships there is always a way to add support for the required feature. We have been constantly improving the design of EMotion FX 2 during the last three years, and still we keep refining it to make it more and more powerful and as easy as possible to work with.
About the realism that can be reached, our current customers are able to create characters over 25000 triangles each. Those are regular game characters. The main character can be made easily over 100000 triangles. The average game character you see these days are about 3000 to 5000 triangles each for the main character. EMotion FX 2 allows developers to use the latest hardware on the most efficient way as well, allowing much higher poly counts. This also makes it possible to spend a good amount of detail in the faces of the characters, for cool looking facial expressions.
Approximately how many facial expressions can be programmed with the EMotion FX 2?
JVDB: EMotion FX has no limit on the amount of facial expressions. Well, the theoretical limit on a 32 bit machine is 4294967296 to be exact. This of course will be more than enough, even for the years to come
What are the key factors in designing a great facial expression? How can developers translate their vision into something that the players will see, relate to, and care about emotionally?
JVDB:
a) Talented artists with empathy for the characters they are creating and then
b) A game design that allows room for geometric detail on the face of the characters (higher triangle numbers for more precision).
Once you have these ingredients and are using EMFX2, then your artists are completely free to setup facial expressions that can be animated and combined during runtime
The tools we provide allow the artist to express themselves within the character using expressions such as smiling mouths, closed eyes, raised eyebrows, or complete expressions such as looking sad, looking sleepy or in love. Those expressions can be combined and separately animated at runtime. Lipsync can also be put on top of all this. EMotion FX 2 leaves the artist in full control, while most other systems try to automatically create the facial expressions based on, for example, sound input.
Another unique feature of EMotion FX 2 is that it allows artists and programmers to mix different facial animations at the same time. An example of this would be if a character is talking, and then she starts to smile. An unlimited amount of facial animations can be mixed, so you could also let the character wink at you with their eye, while they talk and smile. This increases realism and also the intimacy of the relationship with the character, much as in real life. Another unique feature is that EMotion FX 2 allows developers to dynamically adjust those facial animations at runtime. The expressions of the character can be manually controlled, for example depending on the mood of the character. For example if the character on our website feels happy, she will smile. You can really see she is happy by the look of her face, but also by the way she moves with her body. This makes it finally possible to use emotional story telling, where players get a more emotional connection with the in-game characters. You will really feel the loss when 'your buddy' dies inside the game.
A good example of one of the first games using these kinds of features is probably Half-Life 2.
Another thing I should mention is that EMotion FX 2 also allows you to share facial animations between different characters. You can make a facial motion where a human is laughing and apply this to for example a frog. (Jim Henson would turn in his grave.) The results can be amazing. Our facial animation is totally independent of the shape or looks of a character and it is completely independent of the used technique. For example, we support both mesh-based facial animation and bone based. You can even mix both.
Half-Life 2
How are mouth movements/facial expressions applied to a game that features voice-overs? Are the voices recorded, and then the characters are animated to match the words, or...?
JVDB: First of all, the artists setup visimes for the character's face. Visimes are poses of the face when saying specific phonemes, such as "aaaa", "oooow", "iiiii", "mmmm", etc. EMotion FX allows artists to use up to 13 visimes/phonemes per character. This is enough for very accurate lipsync. Now once those visimes are loaded into the character EMotion FX 2 allows artists to specify a wave file that contains the speech that the character should speak. EMotion FX 2 will now use neural networks and some very advanced techniques to detect when what phoneme is spoken. Based on this the mouth is automatically animated. If for some reason the results on some places would not be accurate, the artists can edit this piece by hand as well.
While we're on the topic, do voice actors create any problems? An artist has one thing in mind, and then a voice actor conveys the message in another way, resulting in a different facial expression than planned...
JVDB: You can do it on two ways: base the facial animation on the sound, or base the sound on the facial animation. Either way, the artist has full freedom with EMotion FX 2, because they animate the expressions on the face, since this is not based on the sound file. So if they already have the sound file, they can load it in, apply lipsync on the character, and animate the facial expressions on top of that. If they do it the other way around, they can create the facial animation, for which voice actors later create the voice. Lipsync can then be later mixed into the facial animation to create the final result.
The female character that MGD developed with EMotion FX 2 is very realistic. How long did it take to create her?
JVDB: There is about 120 hours of texturing and modeling time to create the initial assets, another 50 hours to create facial expression blendshapes and phonemes. There’s about 40 hours in rigging both the facial rigging and skin weighting.
I noticed that she also has excellent light and shadow effects. Is that another one of the EMotion FX 2's features?
JVDB: EMotion FX 2 is independent of the rendering system. So rendering itself is not peformed by EMFX 2. This allows it to be easily integrated inside any engine or rendering API. However, we do provide rendering examples for DirectX 8, DirectX 9 and OpenGL. The nice images you see on the website are using our DirectX 9 rendering support that is still in production.
Suppose I'm a game developer working on a title for Console A. What are the minimum requirements? What must I have or what tools must I use before I can take full advantage of the EMotion FX 2?
JVDB: First of all you need to have a compiler that we support: Microsoft Visual C++ 6, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET or Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003. However, we do have some clients that also use EMFX on other platforms / compilers. But right now we do not officially support other compilers.
Once you have this compiler, you can already use the API, but you want to create your own characters of course. For this you need either 3D Studio Max 4, 5 or 6 or Maya 4, 4.5 or 5.
This is basically all you need. But we assume you have your own rendering engine already to display your game world. Of course you can also use our example rendering routines that we mentioned in the previous question.
What game developers will see when working with EMotion FX 2.
Who has been your primary market so far – PC or console? Who is most interested in the EMotion FX 2?
JVDB: For now our primary market is the PC market. We will start focusing on console games in the near future as well. Most companies that are interested in EMotion FX 2 make massive online RPG games, where characters are very important. Of course there are also game companies that make other type of games that use EMotion FX 2. Our product can be used in any type of game.
What are some of the other titles utilizing your technology, and what can you tell us about them?
JVDB: Because most game developers want to keep their competition in the dark, we are obligated to remain silent about a number of our developer clients. However in Europe the next version of Gothic from Piranha Bytes (Gothic 3) will have Emotion FX 2-powered character animation, as well as a series of RPG titles in Korea, one of these to be a future title from Nexon Corporation, one of the three largest developers in Korea.
Is the EMotion FX 2 only intended for professional use?
JVDB: Yes, right now EMotion FX 2 is focused on professional game developers.
Thank you for your time
Original Source: http://www.gamezone.com/news/02_27_04_09_15AM.htm
EMotion FX 2 Gives Games a Face-Lift
by Louis Bedigian
Mystic Game Development has given RPG developers what they need most: lifelike emotions.
Even with today’s advanced technology, there’s one thing that all games lack: believable facial expressions. I’m not talking about gasps, smiles or laughter. Game artists have done that stuff pretty well. But when it comes to conveying a deep emotion – either of love, of hate, or of trauma – the game industry falls flat on its face. In story and in music they can and have succeeded. But never once have I felt the emotion in a video game character’s face because it just isn’t there. To be honest, it’s not there in any of the CG movies featured in games either.
Will it ever change? At this point no one knows for sure. But there are a few dedicated souls out there who hope that it will change very soon. One of those souls is Mystic Game Development. They sound like a producer of role-playing games, but in actuality they make spectacular game engines.
Their latest, the EMotion FX 2, has serious potential. Only demo shots have been revealed thus far, but take a look at what this thing is capable of producing:
Her snarl, her sneer, her look of anger – it’s impeccable. It looks closer to a CG movie than a video game.
And this is only the beginning. As you’ll discover in this interview, the EMotion FX 2 is being used to create some of some of the most astonishing effects you’ll see in a game.
Please tell our readers what you guys do and what your company, Mystic Game Development, is all about.
John van der Burg, Development Director: Mystic Game Development is a game technology middleware company, which means we work on products that game companies can use inside their games. EMotion FX 2 is our latest product, which is a real-time character animation system. We specialized in this field to provide game developer with an advanced and flexible character animation system to take their in-game characters to the next level. Besides that it of course also saves them a lot of development time and risk.
We aim to provide cutting edge tools to make the next generation of games more compelling, more addictive and more real.
Tell us how the technology works. What level of control does it give to game developers?
JVDB: Basically EMotion FX 2 allows artist to create characters and motions in 3D Studio Max or Maya, which can then be exported into custom file formats that our SDK can read. Once this data is loaded, the game can display the characters, while EMotion FX 2 performs all the motions on the body and face. EMotion FX 2 takes care of all the transitions between different motions and mixing of different motions at the same time. Next to this we provide a set of Inverse Kinematics solvers, which can be very useful when the characters have to aim guns, grab objects or when the feet have to be placed on the surface below the character. Another important feature of EMotion FX 2 is high quality facial animation and lipsync. There are many other features as well, too many to mention here. It is the best for people to have a look at our website's feature list. Developers get full control on the character. They can control it at very high level, but can also dive so deep into the API that they can write custom interpolation, collision or blending routines or adjust keyframing data.
“I’ll get that Lara Croft, I swear! Even if it’s the last thing I do!”
The EMotion FX 2 looks very expansive. Just how far can game developers go with thing? What level of realism can be reached?
JVDB: EMotion FX 2 has a different design from most other real-time animation systems we have seen. Our animation system needs to be usable in any type of game. Also it needs to be very flexible to be sure that we can add new features to it very easily. Also EMotion FX 2 is very modular, which allows people to replace specific components if they don’t suit their needs. If something is not possible to achieve with EMotion FX 2 as it ships there is always a way to add support for the required feature. We have been constantly improving the design of EMotion FX 2 during the last three years, and still we keep refining it to make it more and more powerful and as easy as possible to work with.
About the realism that can be reached, our current customers are able to create characters over 25000 triangles each. Those are regular game characters. The main character can be made easily over 100000 triangles. The average game character you see these days are about 3000 to 5000 triangles each for the main character. EMotion FX 2 allows developers to use the latest hardware on the most efficient way as well, allowing much higher poly counts. This also makes it possible to spend a good amount of detail in the faces of the characters, for cool looking facial expressions.
Approximately how many facial expressions can be programmed with the EMotion FX 2?
JVDB: EMotion FX has no limit on the amount of facial expressions. Well, the theoretical limit on a 32 bit machine is 4294967296 to be exact. This of course will be more than enough, even for the years to come
What are the key factors in designing a great facial expression? How can developers translate their vision into something that the players will see, relate to, and care about emotionally?
JVDB:
a) Talented artists with empathy for the characters they are creating and then
b) A game design that allows room for geometric detail on the face of the characters (higher triangle numbers for more precision).
Once you have these ingredients and are using EMFX2, then your artists are completely free to setup facial expressions that can be animated and combined during runtime
The tools we provide allow the artist to express themselves within the character using expressions such as smiling mouths, closed eyes, raised eyebrows, or complete expressions such as looking sad, looking sleepy or in love. Those expressions can be combined and separately animated at runtime. Lipsync can also be put on top of all this. EMotion FX 2 leaves the artist in full control, while most other systems try to automatically create the facial expressions based on, for example, sound input.
Another unique feature of EMotion FX 2 is that it allows artists and programmers to mix different facial animations at the same time. An example of this would be if a character is talking, and then she starts to smile. An unlimited amount of facial animations can be mixed, so you could also let the character wink at you with their eye, while they talk and smile. This increases realism and also the intimacy of the relationship with the character, much as in real life. Another unique feature is that EMotion FX 2 allows developers to dynamically adjust those facial animations at runtime. The expressions of the character can be manually controlled, for example depending on the mood of the character. For example if the character on our website feels happy, she will smile. You can really see she is happy by the look of her face, but also by the way she moves with her body. This makes it finally possible to use emotional story telling, where players get a more emotional connection with the in-game characters. You will really feel the loss when 'your buddy' dies inside the game.
A good example of one of the first games using these kinds of features is probably Half-Life 2.
Another thing I should mention is that EMotion FX 2 also allows you to share facial animations between different characters. You can make a facial motion where a human is laughing and apply this to for example a frog. (Jim Henson would turn in his grave.) The results can be amazing. Our facial animation is totally independent of the shape or looks of a character and it is completely independent of the used technique. For example, we support both mesh-based facial animation and bone based. You can even mix both.
Half-Life 2
How are mouth movements/facial expressions applied to a game that features voice-overs? Are the voices recorded, and then the characters are animated to match the words, or...?
JVDB: First of all, the artists setup visimes for the character's face. Visimes are poses of the face when saying specific phonemes, such as "aaaa", "oooow", "iiiii", "mmmm", etc. EMotion FX allows artists to use up to 13 visimes/phonemes per character. This is enough for very accurate lipsync. Now once those visimes are loaded into the character EMotion FX 2 allows artists to specify a wave file that contains the speech that the character should speak. EMotion FX 2 will now use neural networks and some very advanced techniques to detect when what phoneme is spoken. Based on this the mouth is automatically animated. If for some reason the results on some places would not be accurate, the artists can edit this piece by hand as well.
While we're on the topic, do voice actors create any problems? An artist has one thing in mind, and then a voice actor conveys the message in another way, resulting in a different facial expression than planned...
JVDB: You can do it on two ways: base the facial animation on the sound, or base the sound on the facial animation. Either way, the artist has full freedom with EMotion FX 2, because they animate the expressions on the face, since this is not based on the sound file. So if they already have the sound file, they can load it in, apply lipsync on the character, and animate the facial expressions on top of that. If they do it the other way around, they can create the facial animation, for which voice actors later create the voice. Lipsync can then be later mixed into the facial animation to create the final result.
The female character that MGD developed with EMotion FX 2 is very realistic. How long did it take to create her?
JVDB: There is about 120 hours of texturing and modeling time to create the initial assets, another 50 hours to create facial expression blendshapes and phonemes. There’s about 40 hours in rigging both the facial rigging and skin weighting.
I noticed that she also has excellent light and shadow effects. Is that another one of the EMotion FX 2's features?
JVDB: EMotion FX 2 is independent of the rendering system. So rendering itself is not peformed by EMFX 2. This allows it to be easily integrated inside any engine or rendering API. However, we do provide rendering examples for DirectX 8, DirectX 9 and OpenGL. The nice images you see on the website are using our DirectX 9 rendering support that is still in production.
Suppose I'm a game developer working on a title for Console A. What are the minimum requirements? What must I have or what tools must I use before I can take full advantage of the EMotion FX 2?
JVDB: First of all you need to have a compiler that we support: Microsoft Visual C++ 6, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET or Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003. However, we do have some clients that also use EMFX on other platforms / compilers. But right now we do not officially support other compilers.
Once you have this compiler, you can already use the API, but you want to create your own characters of course. For this you need either 3D Studio Max 4, 5 or 6 or Maya 4, 4.5 or 5.
This is basically all you need. But we assume you have your own rendering engine already to display your game world. Of course you can also use our example rendering routines that we mentioned in the previous question.
What game developers will see when working with EMotion FX 2.
Who has been your primary market so far – PC or console? Who is most interested in the EMotion FX 2?
JVDB: For now our primary market is the PC market. We will start focusing on console games in the near future as well. Most companies that are interested in EMotion FX 2 make massive online RPG games, where characters are very important. Of course there are also game companies that make other type of games that use EMotion FX 2. Our product can be used in any type of game.
What are some of the other titles utilizing your technology, and what can you tell us about them?
JVDB: Because most game developers want to keep their competition in the dark, we are obligated to remain silent about a number of our developer clients. However in Europe the next version of Gothic from Piranha Bytes (Gothic 3) will have Emotion FX 2-powered character animation, as well as a series of RPG titles in Korea, one of these to be a future title from Nexon Corporation, one of the three largest developers in Korea.
Is the EMotion FX 2 only intended for professional use?
JVDB: Yes, right now EMotion FX 2 is focused on professional game developers.
Thank you for your time
Original Source: http://www.gamezone.com/news/02_27_04_09_15AM.htm
![[TB] Benedictine](/data/avatars/m/0/287.jpg?1319140865){kind=avatar}
