Thursday, July 25, 2013

Project WOTO - KMMIE - Facial Scanning Tech

Here is the new tech we were working on for Depth Analysis at KMMIE.  It shows the old heads we were working with on L.A. Noire, and what we where we were going with them in real time for Project WOTO.

All of the modeling, unwrapping, sculpting, mapping, and blending work was done by myself.  The Depth Analysis work was done by Scott Mcmillan, and the incredible pipeline and tools work by Hamish McKenzie.  We used the original scan data is from Depth Analysis, using a line from L.A. Noire by the actor  Bob Clendenning.




In L.A. Noire all of the makeup and face textures had to be scanned in, which required all of the texture work to be finalized on the scanning end.  With this new tech, we moved all of that responsibility to the character artist, who was then allowed to do any texturing required, from makeup to gunshot wounds. And the biggest advantage was being able to put a realistic talking head, connected to a game mesh (which we couldn't do in L.A. Noire).  No more hiding neck seams behind collar attire.  With this new method we were able to get perfect real time facial animations using realistic in game budgets.