Sunday 12 October 2008

Softimage XSI case study on Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden

Following from last month's post of me praising the making-of article on the official Softimage XSI website where Metal Gear Solid 4 was shown throughout its various stages of creation, the nice people at Softimage have done another one of those excellent features, this time on the Ninja Gaiden 2 game title.

Behind the development of this game is Team Ninja, a game production group at TECMO, LTD. The team said that their objective for the new Ninja Gaiden 2 was to develop a game that was as enjoyable to look at as it was to play. In particular, their mission was to fully utilize the processing capabilities of the next-generation Xbox 360 to take real-time image display to the next level.

To create expressive animated characters the creative team started working with real-time shaders to add details that would improve the game resolution required for a next-generation console. But the main issue they faced was how to raise the quality of the facial animation that would accompany this added detail. It was at this time that one of the directors of Ninja Gaiden 2, Hiroaki Matsui, took a look at SOFTIMAGEFACE ROBOT. The team felt that Face Robot provided the level of accuracy required for facial capture operations. The fact that it was designed with an export function for game run-time was another major reason why they decided to adopt Face Robot...

Read more about this here, while this article is not as thorough as the previously mentioned Metal Gear one it is still well worth anyone with a research or practical interest in 3D games modelling and animation.

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