One of the more intriguing aspects of next gen consoles lays not just in their overwhelming power but in their ability to channel that power for a more nuanced visual look. In other words, it explains why the facial animationfor games like Ryse: Son of Rome and Killzone: Shadow Fall are already superior to current-gen titles.
GamingBolt recently had a chance to speak to OC3 Entertainment’s Doug Perkowski on facial animation suite FaceFX, which will incorporate a new SDK especially for the PS4 and Xbox One thus taking advantage of the power of next-gen consoles.
On being asked about the new Facial Animation Runtime for next gen consoles, he responded that, “We were able to add multi-threading support, reduce memory fragmentation, and boost the overall performance by a wide margin. Our file loading code was completely re-written to achieve an order of magnitude increase in performance. In general, everything was redesigned from the ground up to be more efficient and use less system resources.
We also asked if it made for easier lip syncing when it comes to localizing specific languages (for example: the lip syncing of an English speaker will differ from that of a Japanese speaker). “FaceFX has always handled localization very well. Even a modest amount of dialog can require a very robust facial animation when you multiply it by all the languages that need to be supported. FaceFX supports English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Czech.
“We are working on adding Russian, European Portuguese, and Brazilian Portuguese. Other languages can be used if you use transliterated text or without providing any transcription of the audio.”
One way or another, facial animation for the PS4 and Xbox One will only get better as tools like FaceFX add support. What are your thoughts on the future of facial animation in next-gen games? Let us know below.
