Naughty Dog takes facial animation to the next generation in Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. Emotions are much more expressed and graphics are more detailed than ever. Naughty Dog reveals that face models now animate with anywhere between 300 and 500 "bones."
Naughty Dog's writer, Josh Scherr, compared Uncharted 4: A Thief's End with their previous Uncharted games and The Last of Us. "We've completely revamped our facial animation systems," Scherr said. "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."
"Now, the faces have anywhere between 300 and 500 bones," Scherr revealed. "This lets us get much, much more detail and fidelity in there, so you can really empathise with what [the characters] are saying, and it allows us to hit certain poses that we couldn't quite hit before." With this, the team at Naughty Dog were able to animate the characters much better which allowed them to tell the stories much better as well.
Naughty Dog's lead designer, Ricky Cambier, explained how the new-gen technology allowed them to push details "on a macro and micro level" and how it helped them add more "bones" to the faces in order to improve the character's expression of emotions. "You pan round the camera to look at Nate's face when he's climbing and you see him grimacing and all this kind of stuff," Cambier explained.
Scherr added that they can now do more of the things that they have done with their previous games. For instance, they can now afford to record the game at 30 frames per second to make the animation run smoother compared to the 10 or 15 frames per second in their older games.
Naughty Dog has previously revealed that they are aiming for 60 fps for Uncharted 4: A Thief's End but will not push it if it means compromising the overall experience. Publisher Sony announced that Uncharted 4 release date will be delayed to Spring of 2016.
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