Wilson at Blur also was frustrated, especially when Miller pointed out places where the facial animation wasn’t working, particularly around the jaw and the mouth. He levels plenty of criticism at the tools that have been available from Alias, Autodesk, Softimage, and LightWave, saying the Blur team worked arduously on facial expressions, only to end up with animation they considered unworthy of their efforts.
When it comes to facial animation, Miller is opinionated and outspoken. On this particular day, the people at Blur were taking an earthquake training course, though Tim mused that it seemed unnecessary to take a course in “running and screaming.” Like so many people in the animation business, the people at Blur are friendly and funny when they’re not being driven by murderous deadlines. On a recent visit with Blur Studios, we talked with Blur’s President and Creative Director Tim Miller and Jeff Wilson, animation supervisor. Most recently, it was used to complete a series of game cinematics for Xmen Legend 2. Softimage’s Face Robot technology is being utiliized for many projects at Blur. Its body of work includes mischievous animated critters such as the Academy Award nominee Gopher Broke and plenty of human character animation for cinematics in games such as X-Men Legends 2 Rise of Apocalypse. Rather, Blur prides itself on turning out high-quality 3D animation on time and on budget. However, Blur is not the kind of studio that puts an army of technicians to work on specialized software.
The bar is moved.Īt Blur Studios, in Venice Beach, CA, the quest for good facial animation is close to an obsession. But then, an animated character like Gollum comes along, a combination of talented acting by Andy Serkis, and stellar animation by at least 18 animators working for Weta. And certainly there is a whole beautiful body of work that supports this point including Disney’s Snow White, Hayao Miyazakiís Spirited Away, Pixar’s melding of classic squash-and-stretch with 3D in The Incredibles. When it comes to animating humans, it’s better to opt for more stylized faces so the viewer doesn’t get distracted. The problem is a classic one for animators-many of whom have fallen back on the argument that there is no place for hyper-realistic human animation. If possible, I'd like to ask the almighty SADX masterminds to look into this and help us make this broken game sound a little closer to what it originally was.Rock Falcon, the poster boy for Softimage’s Face Robot technology, takes digital acting to new heights with expressive facial animation. As soon as I set the framerate back to 60 FPS, the problem comes back. Finally, out of curiosity I ran the game at "normal" (30 FPS) framerate with regular CPU speed, and guess what? The sounds loop and stop properly at 30 FPS. Then I tried lowering CPU speed on my laptop, and the sound started looping properly when it was low enough for framerate dips. I then checked the restored Sky Deck 2 announcements ("Descending into the clouds" and "Go up - full speed ahead!") that get cut off too early - and they didn't get cut off. However! When I was playing SADX on my tablet (which struggles to maintain a playable framerate when the PL mod is enabled), I noticed that the Egg Hornet sound was looped properly like on the Dreamcast. I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a long sound that loops seamlessly like on the Dreamcast, but in SADX (both GC and PC) it gets cut off too early before the next loop, and it sounds a bit weird. So I was looking at sound stuff again, and it seems like there's an issue with how SADX handles the timing of certain (all?) looping sounds.įor example, check out the background engine sound in Egg Hornet. Anything related to Mission Mode and Mini Game Collection Various miscellaneous items, such as the "BALLS" text in Casino Pause menu items, including button rectangle Scoreboard background and all scoreboard text and icons, including bosses, Sky Chase, Hedgehog Hammer and Twinkle Circuit Image of Sonic used on the ingame model of the emblem Emblem icons in the results screen (by Dark Sonic) This isn't an exact recreation of SA1/SADX assets in HD, although the Dreamcast version was used as a reference and attempts were made to imitate it where possible. First release of the HD GUI mod, which provides high-resolution graphics for various ingame menus and GUI items.