How important is facial animation to selling the believability of the characters that you're interacting with, to telling a story?
TL;DRFacial animation matters a great deal because so much connection with people happens in the face, for cinematics and AI alike, and it adds a deeper performance on top of body animation.
Well, one of the things that is really kind of interesting, and you can actually test this right now in the game, and you can do it as players to players if you're using the FOIP system, for instance, is put your helmet on. Put on an opaque helmet. Look at what you're looking at. And what you're going to find out is that you're looking at the person in general, right? He's waving or he's doing this or he's pulling out this weapon or whatever he's doing. The second he takes that helmet off, you're looking at his face. Everything happens right here. So much of our understanding and connection with people happens just in this tiny little area that it becomes exceedingly important, especially in the case of, say, cinematics, the work that the facial team has done on the cinematics or the work that they've done on the marketing stuff. It's also important in the case of the AI. So that's another thing that we're going to be coming on with the facial team: as the body animations, and the way that we've had to shoot them, which is often without a head cam at the same time... the facial animations start coming onto a character. We had a perfect example of that yesterday. There was a character sitting on a bunk bed, and they were looking at a mobiGlas, and their feet were moving a little bit. They weren't kicking them back and forth or anything like that, but they were like... and you're looking at my face right now, I can tell, right? They're doing this. And one of the designers said, well, we need sad, we need happy, we need nervous animations for this bunk bed. Or the person on the bunk bed. And it was like, do you? Because what if I'm like, oh my God, yeah, that's awesome. Or I'm like, oh God, I don't think we're going to make this. Or, oh, you've got to be fucking kidding me. So that's an example of, just from a body animation standpoint, then you put it on that face and you get a sort of deeper performance.