Metahuman facial animation

More on topic, I should hope that these facial animation tools will impact the movie industry more than the games industry, because I certainly cannot envision any way in which this will elevate the quality of an RPG.

Well, I think that depends on whether the RPG is attempting to use facial animation to convey a convincing performance. Some styles of RPG make extensive use of animated talking heads in dialog situations, and quite often this is done poorly, with unnatural expressions, bad lip-syncing, and so on.

I think the value of tools like this is to make it much easier and cheaper to achieve decent results, that don't detract from the experience.
 
Joined
Nov 8, 2014
Messages
12,085
Not always. Excessive reliance on frameworks and popular libraries may reduce your flexibility. I once had a contractor, who relied heavily on AngularJS, confess to being unable to reproduce a certain chart that I wanted in a web application (a line chart superimposed on a heat map) with their usual tools.
So true, I often have the impression to be limited by frameworks or libs, wondering whether I'm perhaps misusing it and not following the right pattern, or they simply provided for basic cases. It ends up in a series of bug reports / suggestions / pull requests and in some very rare cases, improvements of the framework - usually it's rather about finding the workaround :D

But still, it's generally a time saver vs doing everything oneself, for large frameworks anyway. It also allows others to understand and build on what you have, instead of having to extend your own library.
 
Joined
Aug 29, 2020
Messages
10,159
Location
Good old Europe
I think in the context of the games industry, it's unavoidable. A game engine is essentially just a pile of frameworks and libraries, and a set of gui tools to make many tasks as efficient and accessible as possible. In the vast majority of cases, trying to build everything from the ground up is infeasible, and probably inadvisable, since huge amounts of low-level work has already been battle-tested and optimised, with huge communities of people familiar with it.
 
Joined
Nov 8, 2014
Messages
12,085
Back
Top Bottom