The “Break it Down” Blog

Pendulum Studios has launched their facial-animation studio branch: AlterEgo. AlterEgo is also the name of the cutting edge facial mo-cap and animation software that Pendulum has developed and integrated with a handful of other developer studios (Konami, Digital Extremes, Lion Head, THQ, etc.) and projects out there (Silent Hill 5, Dark Sector, Stuntman: Ignition, etc), check out their Client & Project’s page.

My guess is up until this point your reaction has been “so what”, so was mine until I saw their facial re-targeting demo video here:

Besides being creeped out to no end at these headless, lifelike things talking to me, I was severely impressed. There is also a high-res GDC ‘08 demo reel on their site you can check out as well with some pretty interesting bits in there.

The one thing I immediately thought of when I saw the lay-overs with the mo-cap setup and the final rendered scene was the “make of” video series for Heavenly Sword on GameTrailers, specifically the segment on the mo-cap and Andy Serkis’s work as the king.

I’m excited to see mo-cap moving forward with the precision and speed-to-production that advancements like this offer, but also wonder if this really scales. With typical mo-cap setups being too damn expensive for small or independent developers to make use of, is the real solution for realistic animation in gaming really more along the lines of physical motion-blending engines like LucasArt’s Endorphin engine that is being used in the upcoming Force Unleashed and Indiana Jones titles?

It’s hard to say, but if the difference comes down shipping a game-engine out of the box with 200 to 300 pre-recorded animations and letting game developers arbitrarily blend them to make their own characters come to life, versus telling a developer they have to rent or build their own mo-cap studio to capture all the animation for their upcoming title, I’d have to imagine the developer will tend towards the engine that ships with the massive amount of assets out of the box.

This is somewhat along the lines of the difference between a company selling a slew of digital assets to be used in games for natural flora and fauna, or a company coming along and selling an engine that (on the fly) given a numerous amount of inputs can just generate you natural looking flora and fauna (e.g. SpeedTree)

I’d have to lean towards the generative-engine being the winner in the long-run here.