BioWare's Ben Cloward on Facial Animation

A thread on the official forums highlights a lecture by Ben Cloward, Senior Technical Artist at BioWare. The session, entitled Automated Emotion: Facial Animation in Star Wars: The Old Republic, goes into detail about the methods used by BioWare to generate facial animations for the huge amount of dialogue in The Old Republic. Calithlin, who attended the session, shared his experience with the community.

There were a lot of topics discussed, but the main focus was on getting all the facial animation for the dialogue to be generated by software, rather than completely hand-keyed. (If done by hand, it would take four animators TEN YEARS of work around the clock, 24/7, no breaks, solid work to get it all done for every bit of dialogue.)

More after the jump.
This system is useful for more than simply human faces, as Calithlin explains:

However, there were also some slides on aliens and how their animations for dialogue could use the same system with just some tweaks to their animation rigs. From the pictures I saw (one of them not included) there were Bith, Devaronian, Abyssin, Gamorrean, Nikto, Arconan, Weequay and two I did not recognize.

He goes on to give his impressions of the presentation:

The animations produced for the dialogue were very lifelike and well done considering it is mostly procedurally generated as opposed to hand-done. Every character canl be given a set emotion that determines their general mood, and beyond that every line they speak will be animated on top of that with another layer of animation (are they disgusted, sad? happy? Over 27 emotive facial expression).

It is certainly impressive that BioWare has developed a method to quickly generate facial animations for a wide variety of alien species with very disparate facial structures. Many games have fallen short in that regard, with facial animations on par with wooden puppets. Manually designing animations can overcome this limitation but is extremely time-consuming. From the information given in this session, it appears BioWare has put together the best of both worlds: accurate and life-like facial animations, and efficient production times. In a game with so much dialogue, this technology becomes even more important.

Thanks again to Calithlin for the great information. For photos taken by Calithlin at the session, visit his thread on the official forums. Hat tip to Gregthegen for the heads up on the story.

Comments

  • Nerf Herder
    Fembo's avatar
    • Posts: 15
    #9 Fembo Posted 3/17/2010 9:54:08 PM
    I'm wondering which of the pictured you are saying is a Weequay. Unless you saw more pictures then just what Calithlin has on his tor thread. Rest of the info is very well organized and good comments. I am very anxious to see expressions in the dialog in game. Nothing entertains me more then getting a computer animated character to put on a look of disgust :)

    One of the pictured aliens looks similar to a <ahref="http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Advozse">Advozse. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Advozse
    Not sure if it is for sure, the one in the picture looks like a child if it is, or it's head is just really small.
  • Dark Lord
    r2d2arm's avatar
    • Posts: 440
    #8 r2d2arm Posted 3/14/2010 11:37:07 PM
    Nice article Looks like a Kel Dor is shown in one of the images and a Advozse is the horned alien. I searched through the Cantina aliens until I found that Advozse. Great to see some more obscure aliens possibly in the game, really adds to the whole concept of immersion into the Star Wars galaxy.

    Correction: Looks like the Kel Dor is an Anomid instead
  • Jawa Trader
    L'innommable's avatar
    • Posts: 89
    #6 L'innommable Posted 3/14/2010 11:10:05 PM
    At the end, only one emotion matters: the smile upon the Swtor's players' faces.
  • Zenkei's avatar
    • Posts: 0
    #7 Zenkei Posted 3/14/2010 11:30:23 PM
    That reminds me of a line from the The Prestige by Hugh Jackman's character: "It was the look on their faces." So I can definitely agree that all that truthfully matters at the end is that people are pleased with the end product and that the game is both challenging and fun to the majority of players.
  • Spice Runner
    Gregthegen's avatar
    • Posts: 118
    #5 Gregthegen Posted 3/14/2010 10:04:27 PM
    Finding this article was delightful> I was worried about how Bioware was going to handle all of that Dialogue (with their promice of great character expression) and I am pleased on how they've carried it out. (Rewatches the TOR Gamescom presentation with the knowledge that all of those expressions are based on this system)
  • Zenkei's avatar
    • Posts: 0
    #4 Zenkei Posted 3/14/2010 9:43:32 PM
    I would assume that there will be many species, possibly 20 or more. That way character customization comes in and lets players feel unique instead of a carbon copy of someone else. In a story-based game, feeling like an individual is very important.
  • Nerf Herder
    skymarshallarts's avatar
    • Posts: 10
    #3 skymarshallarts Posted 3/14/2010 8:47:09 PM
    Fun to see all the races obviously allready included. The Bith especially. Wonder if you get to play the "xylophone"-thingy from the movies in-game ... hehe!
  • Jawa Trader
    Bzrk's avatar
    • Posts: 80
    #1 Bzrk Posted 3/14/2010 8:21:40 PM
    Nice! Can't wait to see those aliens all in action.

    This also proves that Bioware is spending a lot of time and money on ways to make the whole design process easier.
  • Dark Councilor
    sado's avatar
    • Posts: 1,754
    #2 sado Posted 3/14/2010 8:39:31 PM
    It was pretty interesting to see them highlighting the lesser known species for that piece. Can't wait to see how many species there are in the game.
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