Assassin’s Creed is looking to up the bar with facial animations through kinect, however will they able to show up LA. Noire?
Assassin’s Creed: Revelations is implementing a whole new facial animation system that is called Mocam, and this isn’t something that suffers from the constraints faced by the previous leader in the fields of realistic head modeling, Team Bondi’s L.A. Noire.
“One of the elements that’s really interesting about Mocam is that, while it creates a lot of high-fidelity character expression and movement, the actor doesn’t need to look like the character he’s playing,” says lead game designer Alexandre Breault. “It’s a system that’s able to interpolate the facial movements of one person and apply them to any model. That gives us a lot of flexibility with our actors.”
One of the other issues of L.A. Noire happen to face in capturing something so realistic as acting performances was the sense of a character’s face being disconnected from the body model – which seems to be lacking in some animations – but this isn’t an issue for Mocam, Breault has claimed that “They’re also able to act with their whole body, as the system isn’t just limited to the head. Mocam doesn’t create a clash between facial expression and body movement – it’s all integrated,” he told NowGamer. “It allows realistic facial expression, but not at the cost of actor expression as normal mo-cap does.”
L.A. Noire has really set a high benchmark for convincingly life-like facial animation that you can find in games, so if Assassin’s Creed: Revolations can approach similar levels for its vast cast of historical characters, the conclusion to the “Ezio trilogy” will hopefully be something to behold, especially if we end up playing a more extensive game.
