Ubisoft has claimed that you won’t see the same thing happen twice in Watch Dogs, its open world hacking adventure due to arrive next month for current and last-gen platforms. To help aid that uniqueness, the team has created more than 13,000 unique animations to bring Chicago to life.

GamingBolt spoke to animation director Colin Graham about the motion capture process behind Watch Dogs and the unique animations for protagonist Aiden Pearce and the pedestrians in-game. Graham stated that, “Watch_Dogs has an unprecedented amount of animation to build both Aiden Pearce and The living city of Chicago. Over the past 5 years we’ve shot over 100 days of Motion capture for the game play team alone. This is spread between the Main Character of Aiden Pearce, the Living city civilians and the enemy AI.

“Aiden Pearce’s Animation were built from the ground up for Watch_Dogs. Aiden has approximately 4000 animation files in game. Aiden has approximately 2300 navigation and interaction, and driving related animation files and about 1700 combat related files.

“Our AI enemy NPCs have a wide combat system, with several distinct mental states and in depth reactions to hacking ingredients . The enemy AI has almost 4000 animation clips.

“The biggest difference between Watch_Dogs and previous games in the genre is how much animation is dedicated to the living city. Civilians of Watch_Dogs Chicago have the greatest number of animations in our production. They can have occupational animations, conversations, interactions with the world and reactions to dynamic ingredients, a variety of reaction to various threats, and they come in a variety of sizes, attitudes with different clothing and props.

“There are over 5000 unique animation clips required for the living city civilian simulation in Watch_Dogs. Overall there are more than 13,000 animation clips needed to bring Watch_Dogs to life, mainly because the game is a systemic open world game that has to cover a massive amount of contexts with many random elements. Watch_Dogs has more animation than any Ubisoft Production to date.”

Rumours have been circulating about the resolution for the Xbox One and PS4 versions with only the latter having a 1080p resolution. So what will be the resolutions across all versions?

Guay stated that, “The precise resolutions have yet to be locked. We will confirm as soon as they are finalized.”

Considering Watch Dogs will be out on May 27th for PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360 and PC, it’s interesting that the resolutions are yet to be locked. Maybe we’ll see a patch release later to up the resolution for some versions a la Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag? Stay tuned for more information and let us know what you think in the comments.

Respawn Entertainment’s Titanfall had a ton of motion capture to go into every movement you see in the game. Considering that there are AI bot movements, parkouring movements, fighting scenes and much more, that’s a ton of motion capture for what’s essentially a multiplayer title. Mo-cap artist Mohammad Alavi recently released a video that goes behind the scenes of the mo-cap process, essentially showing off both Pilot and Grunt maneuvers.

“I co-directed and acted in many of the mocap sessions for Titanfall. Especially the combat and campaign specific shoots. My background in martial arts and small stature make me an ideal candidate to be thrown around a lot,” stated Alavi on his YouTube channel. We’d say it paid off though – those movements are spot on and realistically fit the context of the game.

Speaking of which, Titanfall is currently available for PC and Xbox One, with the Xbox 360 version due on April 8th in North America and April 11th in Europe. Stay tuned for more details.

According to Dimensional, “DI4D is able to derive super high definition facial motion capture from an array of nine standard video cameras, without using markers, makeup or special illumination. Remedy will use DI4D software to process facial performance capture in Quantum Break.”

Remedy creative director Sam Lake also stated that, “Quantum Break is a hugely ambitious project that combines action and narrative components in a unique way to bring the characters to life. The only way to achieve the high quality of performance was to create highly realistic digital doubles of talented actors. By using Dimensional Imaging’s DI4D facial performance-capture solution combined with Remedy’s Northlight storytelling technology we can ensure that every nuance of the actors’ performances are captured on screen.”

Will it translate into a fun gameplay experience? We’ll stay tuned and find out for ourselves in the coming months.

“Right. As far as I know they are not developing HL3 now for several reasons, among them the mo-cap issue. Sorry for any confusion. What they might decide in the future depends on lots of different factors. I hope they do, personally, but it has to make sense for them.”

While the post is two years old, Lowrie’s comments are fairly recent. He also talked about issues with motion-capture for Half Life 3. “Here is the biggest challenge with bringing out Half-Life 3: the big thing now with FPSs is motion capture, or mo-cap. One of the great things about Half-Life 2 is that all of the characters that you meet actually look at you when they talk to you no matter where you go or stand.

“With mo-cap you can’t do that, at least not yet. Once you film the actor doing something and capture that motion, that’s what the character is going to do. This works great in movies, but when you make something interactive it gets way less interactive with mo-cap. So that’s one of the things they’re working on.”

Of course, Valve is also very busy with just about everything else, primarily Steam. “Well, I’m not sure how big it is for HL2 fans. They don’t tell me their business plans, this was just a conversation I had. Right now they’re pretty full up with all the games they already have out there that they continue to support, plus the Steam stuff that they do, so, I don’t want to get people’s hopes up.

“I have no idea what they’re planning for the future. But I did have that conversation with some Valve folks, so I thought you might like to know what they’re thinking about.”

Faceware Technologies, an animation-specific technology firm has announced their newest product, Faceware Live, which shows incredible promise in its contribution potential to gaming animation.

The new software, available in late 2013 is capable of live rendering facial expressions and transferring them onto a 3D model. The implications of this in terms of the gaming industry cannot be understated. Not only does the mean that gamers can expect more realistic, spot on animations in their console games, but it means that Hollywood actors, who have already begun making their way into gaming with voice acting and such, will begin to play a much more pivotal role in a game.

Beyond the story, now the gamer can get a real performance from a person, not a person manipulating a program to give a performance. It’s an entirely new level of depth to gaming; the likes of which we have only just begun to see with more primitive forms of motion capture technology.

When asked to comment, Peter Busch, vice president of business development at Faceware said, “We’ve seen growing demand across a number of industries for real-time facial motion capture,” said Peter Busch, vice president of business development at Faceware Technologies. “Faceware Live is our revolutionary approach to meeting this demand. This product addresses the many challenges that arise in production and enables rapid content creation for anything from live stage performances to on-set pre-visualization to a desktop tool for animators.”

There are, of course, serious implications to this technology that reach far beyond the world of gaming, and Busch is very aware of that. We’re all excited to see what new developments will come out of the implementation of Faceware Live, stay tuned to Gamingbolt for updates.

CEO and co-founder Gaspard Breton stated that “We strongly believe in markerless facial motion capture as it is the only technology able to capture the so many subtle movements of the face accurately and for every region including inner lips contour, wrinkles, skin color changes, eye movements… With that new release, Performer is now a 2 year-old product which has proven its accuracy and efficiency.”

Breton states that more information will be revealed on July 21st to 25th at Siggraph 2013. There are apparently no risks involved as Breton states that that Performer 7 will be “using a HMC with a 3D sensor operating at very close range and safe for the eyes. This new technology integrates easily in Performer’s workflow and will deliver very high quality data.”

Other new features involved include monitoring in console mode, improvements in relation to background tasks and the GUI. Interested developers can head here for evaluating the new release.