I was one of these people, and to be fair, we haven't really seen stuff like this before. It's incredible.
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Motion Matching: The cutting-edge technology powering The Last of Us 2
- Thread starter Wollan
- Start date
I was one of these people, and to be fair, we haven't really seen stuff like this before. It's incredible.
Death stranding looks very much like traditional animation techniques. With the water looking so poorly, I don't know if they're doing that much improving the engine at all
This technique vastly speeds up animation production while making it infinitely more naturalistic. This is a 2019 title for sure
Gameplay facial animation
This is incredible. Never seen a game come anywhere close to that in terms of npc facial animation. That has crossed the uncanny valley. Comparing that to the U4 NPCs, the difference is vast.
Anim tech is some of the coolest stuff. The innovations, challenges, and experimentation in the space is never dull to keep up with. And the results speak for themselves. No surprise that Naughty Dog continues to impress with what they're doing on the animation end.
It's truly amazing. I hope you're working on implementing some of these improvements in GoW2. I really miss that jump button, for example :P
This random NPC has better facial animation than 99% of AAA main characters.
Gameplay facial animation
This technique reminds me in a way to LA Noire's facial animation technique in its innovation and effect.
Obviously, this is on another level and actually has a future in potentially revolutionising how games are made.
My mind is completely blown by this tech, I didn't know it existed until this thread. It's like the holy grail of character animation.
Obviously, this is on another level and actually has a future in potentially revolutionising how games are made.
My mind is completely blown by this tech, I didn't know it existed until this thread. It's like the holy grail of character animation.
Amazing. The part before Ellie cut his neck, the guy makes an incredible and real gesture.
Gameplay facial animation
Definitely not numerous... maybe a couple but that can be said about every game. They wouldn't have meta scores in the 90's consistently if numerous journalists didn't like the gameplay.
Sorry but TLOU has some of the best gameplay I've had in a long time... and I play almost everything so there are definitely other opinions. Just like there's people that don't like BOTW or the souls series.
OP
OP
The thing is... the surface idea is so utterly simple.
Just a bit of strategic categorization of the data, some brute-force search algorithm to find the the closest relevant pose that fits with the future trajectory, apply the necessary minute blend between current pose and the next and voila.
But I was told by the internet that every single thing in that video was 100% scripted and wouldn't play like that in any way
From what I remember playing TLoU twice, the gameplay was fantastic. I replayed uncharted 4 recently and consistently high level of dissonance I felt during that made it very unenjoyable, although it still played beautifully. I never had that feeling with TLOU, at least there was context for the violence, which improved the gameplay significantly.
Exactly, that's kind of what I meant by "holy grail". Minimal input, maximum output. It's insane. Every game is gonna use this within 2-3 years.
of course. I have a friend that enjoyed the MP and I played with him a good bit but in my case I played because he asked and I wanted to play with him, not because I wanted to play TLOU MP. Gameplay and how well it plays at the end of the day is subjective for the most part.
Gameplay shown in the demo was pretty generic. ND can create some of the best animation and graphics but they have a long way to go where it really matters and that is gameplay. U4 has serviceable stealth and gun gameplay but everything else is push up and tap x. I felt the same with TLOU.
How was it generic? Because it was just fighting humans with cover shooting and stealth mechanics?
Like sure, if you're going to judge gameplay purely on like "all you do is shoot and melee people", I could see how one could think the gameplay of Last of Us is generic. But gameplay is a lot more than just mechanics.
No other games besides STALKER or This War of Mine deliver what Last of Us provided with its gameplay. Nothing else plays like what that Last of Us 2 demo demonstrated.
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Yeah well detrpit is pretty good in that regard so that could be why you werent that impress. Download the gamersdye video. I think someone else posted the link.
One of the cool things with the way Sony studios are set up is that this kind of development in tech will eventually spread to the other developers through the ICE Team.
Can you explain generic and what you mean by it? I see this word thrown around alot these days and yet no one can elaborate. How is tlou 2 gameplay generic compare to say any other game out there. Use some examples.
that video was absolutely fascinating. i now have a layman's understanding of why that TLOU2 demo moved so beautifully. Sony needs to get the ICE team on this. it should be WWS wide
also means studios with lower budgets have access to top tier motion...…….this can be a huge saving grace for the industry and not just be OMG AAA output only.
Since Last Of Us amazed us all with their impressive E3 showing I thought I'd talk about one of the techniques used in achieving such great results and that this technique can be used by more games right now.
Realtime Animation Tips & Tricks
Accumulated Tips and Tricks over the years by Joakim Hagdahl @RH_Hagdahl
You should be matching poses
One big challenge in game animation is how do you transition from one animation to another. Do you create more transition animations and add these to your state machine? Do you make your blend a second long? Do you add sync point markers to every animation that could possibly be blended together? Do you implement a joint velocity based blend that simulates towards the target joint velocity? Do you implement motion matching and create large motion capture databases?
You could do one thing that isn't actually too complicated or costly and you could use it right away replacing sync point markers which can have markup problems.
Hyped! They did make some great progress even with The Frozen Wilds over the base game so them continuing in this path will make their games even better.
The traversal and long ranged combat animations in HZD were great but they need to use these new motion technics for their melee combat which were the game's(imo) only weakness.
How so? From what I saw it's the closest thing to mimic what a real life encounter with ppl would be like. The AI is dynamic and their movements are like anything else we've ever seen. There's nothing fantastical about it but it's not supposed to be, it's a very grounded series. And imo this is the standard now for any studio aiming for grounded gameplay.
I'm watching the making-of documentary of TLOU and it's literally called "grounded" hehe
Makes me that much more excited for whatever game you guys have coming next!
Meaning GoW2, lol.
I thought it was great, especially certain difficulty modes that made for some very tense and believable encounters.
But that's what I mean
It's very grounded which may lead to non stimulating gameplay. I hope I'm wrong and it has more gameplay mechanics and level design that implements it.
I'd disagree, it's one of the few games that does stealth right and taking down all the enemies without being found is so much fun.
Level design already looks wider and multi-tiered compared to before and the gameplay looks tense as hell, that's more than stimulating.
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It's unbelievable. And there are 5 or more NPCs in one scene, everyone with a very high poly count. This will never run with 30fps/1080p on the base PS4.
Its possible I played it on something that maybe was just not hard for me. I played the main game and DLC in one sitting on a stream so I dont really remember what difficulty it was on, at the very least it was on normal.
Yeah, normal was par for the course like most modern AAA games, not called Souls, that was my first playthrough.
Then I think I did it on Grounded when everyone recommended it, and it was a totally different more visceral experience.
I don't remember the exact settings, but I know supplies were much more scarce, where you had to be more mindful, you have the plan each encounter, and you did not see anything through walls.
