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Infinity Ward's Emslie: Animation 'First And Foremost' Key To Visual Realism
by Staff
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November 6, 2009
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A game that looks realistic may not be as overtly "artistic" as more stylized titles, but in order to portray convincingly authentic visuals, game artists need to have an innate sense of nuance -- and an arsenal of technology -- in order to translate realism into interactive gameplay.
Joel Emslie, lead artist on Infinity Ward's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 tells Gamasutra that high polygon counts aren't the most important aspect of creating a game with true-to-life visuals.
"First and foremost, it's getting animation right. The human eye picks up on everything. It doesn't need very many pixels of movement to realize that something looks fake, so the movement is first and foremost," he says.
Activision-owned Infinity Ward has equipped itself with the means of improving the original Modern Warfare. "We've improved all of our rigging," Emslie says. "We've improved the way we make faces. We've really been tightening the screws with what we've been doing this whole time on the PC, Xbox 360, PS3 -- just really stepping it forward each time we make a new game and learning from all the mistakes from last time. But to set it in reality, the first thing is the animations, getting it to move right."
For Emslie and his team, creating realism is also about looking to other forms of entertainment, and discerning consumers' perception of what's real. "To get things to read properly in a combat environment with the fog of war, particles, tracers, and whatever else, you need to step into a thought process that's almost more from a theatre standpoint. So you're looking at costume design. You're getting parts of your characters to read properly, or to make things look more realistic."
Enabling this commitment to visual realism is powerful technology. "We have texture streaming; that really helps," says Emslie. "The variation that we have in this game is a step beyond what I've ever worked with in my career. So we have that fidelity, but fidelity is nothing if you're not using it properly -- the way we lay out our characters, the way we're packing pixels into their arms and legs and packs. We're really pushing how we do ambient occlusion, so the packs and the gear sit on the character properly. They settle in to look more realistic."
For more about the visual style of Modern Warfare 2 and how Infinity Ward approaches the challenge of realism, read the full Gamasutra feature interview, available today.
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Nothing gets under my skin like when people define "good graphics" as "lots of polygons".
I see games all the time like ES4: Oblivion where they hurl a billion polygons a second at bad animation and grotesque ape-faces. (Oblivion in particular looked like they outsourced art to Alpha Centauri and only sent a text description of what a human looks like.)
I'd like to mention The Sims is a shining example of animation. I was astounded by the attention to detail in Sims 2.
It will be interesting to see how MW2 plays. Although I find it difficult to believe there's much innovation remaining in the military FPS genre, beyond the purely technical.
I love these pre-release interviews. Just a bunch of hot air and carefully crafted hype disguised as an in depth and personal look.
I'm sure it had its high points, but those heads were pretty darn fugly. High performance machines and software mean nothing if they're used with bad art.
But also to be fair, everything I hated in Oblivion was pretty much perfect in Shivering Isles and their take on Fallout was solid.
In this day and age, I think it's practically unacceptable for characters to 'jump' from one animation to another without any blending, or to do as Oblivion did and have the same animations for male and female characters, resulting in all the women having gigantic shoulders, like Olympic swimmers. This really irks me.
Animation seems like the most neglected area of game presentation - many developers, it seems, haven't learned any new tricks since they got to play with IK over ten years ago. In the future, I hope we'll see new things being done in that respect. The big thing will probably come once we sort out the algorithms for doing convincing real-time procedural animation, though that's likely a fairly long way off.