Shove bones right into my head
The Last of Us had pretty good facial animation tech, at least as far as I was concerned. Faces were detailed, emotions were nuanced and it was always clear what the actor behind the character had wanted to convey. From my perspective, the faces in The Last of Us had enough detail in them. Uncharted 4 writer Josh Scherr clearly disagrees.
Speaking to GamesTM, Scherr explained that he feels Uncharted 4 will be capable of telling a much more nuanced story thanks to the sheer number of bones the development team have managed to shove into a single human face.
“We’ve completely revamped our facial animation systems. The previous Uncharted games, and in The Last Of Us, the characters all had about 90 to 100 ‘bones’ in their faces which we used to move the meshes around.”
“Think about that, about how detailed Joel and Ellie’s pained facial expressions were, how well the game captured the respective actors’ – Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson – seminal roles. All that was achieved on the old tech. Now, the faces have anywhere between 300 and 500 bones.”
So, there you have it. You can make a human face more expressive by shoving three to five times as many bones into it. Sounds legit to me.
