Just like good 'ol Saint Nick I decided to bring all you good little boys and girls a big 'ol bag of gifts from my trip to the Game Developers Conference 2010! Here's pictures from Bioware's lecture on
Automated Emotion: Facial Animation in: Star Wars: the Old Republic
There were a lot of topics discussed, but the main focus was on getting all the facial animation for the dialogue to be generated by software, rather than completely hand-keyed. (If done by hand, it would take four animators TEN YEARS of work around the clock, 24/7, no breaks, solid work to get it all done for every bit of dialogue.)
However, there was also some slides on some more aliens and how their animations for dialogue could use the same system with just some tweaks to their animation rigs. From the pictures I saw (one of them not included) there were Bith, Devaronian, Abyssal, Gamorrean, Nikto, Arconan, Weekway and two I did not recognize.
Generally the dialogue they presented to us that the mmodels were animated from was alright. It wasn't the greatest voice acting I've heard, and I understand what I did hear was actually from the game. Most of the dialogue came from Sith or Imperial characters. In general it was good, but the voice actors didn't seem to know how to effectively pause during their lines to really make the delivery believeable. It felt like a lot of run-on sentances thrown at me. But it was just a demo, so there's hope anyhow. Any voice is better than none.
The animations produced for the dialogue were very lifelike and well done considering it is mostly procedurally generated as opposed to hand-done. Every character will be given a set emotion that determines their general mood, and beyond that every line they speak will be animatied on top of that with another layer of animation (are they disgusted, sad? happy? Over 27 emotive facial expression). Plus, in addition to that, the animations differ by if they are asking a question, making an exclamation, or just stating something (all three of these are different for each of the 27 emotions). Ontop of all THAT, there are three other variations of all the emotion combos that the computer selects at random to make sure there is very little similarity between two characters' dialogue animation.
Oh and there will be a lot of natural head movement and eye-darting to prevent NPCs from seeming like statues.
I gave the lecture an A+ overall, and I cannot wait to see some of this animation (and the aliens) in action!
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