next »

[battlerager]

Re: Civilization, don't forget that Civ 4 had an accomplished actor (Leonard Nimoy) voice act, and it made a HUGE difference.

It did? I don't remember  Game was great though.

[Schoq]

he means it made a difference in terms of marketing

[InfiniteStateMachine]

Re: Civilization, don't forget that Civ 4 had an accomplished actor (Leonard Nimoy) voice act, and it made a HUGE difference.

You can only forget something you once knew.

[Superb Joe]

re: the use of non union talent in video games, there's a huge amount of actors out there now especially thanks to the internet that has resulted in a massive race to the bottom in both quality and price. internet delivery has become really easy and effective for single performances and you can get some amazing non union guys to do voice over for whatever at a fantastic price.

union frictions often result in the growth of new talent pools. sometimes organically and sometimes because signatories to collective agreements are secretly fucking things up because they want to incubate their own, cheaper parallel production pipeline because it opens up new streams for them.

the traditional non union talents in california will do well if this goes ahead because of how much development work is there both high and low end. however the sort of high end games with facial performance capture etc are all really entwined with sag apparatus. the studio that gets used most for facial capture in la is owned and run by an sag voice actor. acting is acting and it's not impossible for non union people to get scanned and dotted and whatever, but in terms of aaa stuff the guys with the experience both acting wise and technical wise are part of the machine. i really do wonder how transferrable that segment of development is to new talent pools. everything that only needs performances in front of a mic with a unifying director will be fine, but it might be logistically difficult to make Scab Uncharted.

this is a weird period in history with 3d scanning etc producing long term usable high quality assets that are intergenerational where new talent pools could end up creating banks of digital "actors" by signing away likenesses in perpetuity because they think it's cool to work on a game. strong forward facing negotiations are really neessary right now for tomorrow's problems. it's tough.

did you know some of the people ruining their voices on dragonball z were working for a flat rate 50 dollars an hour? Lol. read a sag agreement and check the rates and working conditions in comparison. imagine 50 dollars an hour for your likeness and voice rights in a video game that gets released on 3 different console generations and you get paid once. and then a sequel comes out where a guy with your face is played by someone else and you don't get compensated. Turd. Piss. i wrote this on a phone a week aftter surgery

any devs out there doing games with ensemble casts through internet delivery: develop a skype style app that allows a central director to work with people on a live call with separate line recordings made and labelled systematically and easily. this shit where a bunch of guys all over the world each do their own parts without bein able to react to each other sounds like ass

[gimymblert]

1- In the long term, any likeness will be a nameless statistical weight in a facial blend database, that will be mine beyond reason, to create realistic fictional character base on parameters find by machine learning algorithm. Said data will be coupled to facial recognition soft that will be able to reproduce 3D doppelganger realistic based on a single low res photography from a phone.

2- There is a race to apply style transfer on voice that will make autotune your grandpa's 16bits voice synthesis, so any voice could replicate any voice with any inflection based on a few parameter and datamine of famous actor performances. If this reach good enough level, it will raise the bar of entry and leave "authenticity" to high budget, completely flooring the entry level cost. Pessimist projection say it will happen in the next 5 year.

It's a bad time to be in the cultural business.

[Torchkas]

hasn't the same been said about 3dcg modeling though?

that they'd replace actors?

[TamaraRyan]

hasn't the same been said about 3dcg modeling though?

that they'd replace actors?

The only benefit to those 3dcg models though is control over all their movements. Which isn't much really. You still need an actor to do the mocap for them. If it were left up to the animators to come up with and animate every single movement, it would be difficult work. Especially if you want it to be as realistic as possible. The reason mocap is becoming such a big thing right now is because it's easier. The actor moves and then the character model moves. Not to mention having a real person performing is going to get you some subtle movements that you might not have thought to inculde.

That, and you still would need an actor to voice that model too. So I don't think 3dcg models are ever going to FULLY replace actors.

[gimymblert]

hasn't the same been said about 3dcg modeling though?

that they'd replace actors?

The evolution isn't finished yet, but cost of 3D scanning and treatment are spiraling down (and blockbuster ambition up).

Good mocap and especially performance capture is still hard and is just a rough pass before a great number of high skilled animator are needed.

We don't have automated animation credible enough even for small work (or it hasn't been implemented in a convincing way) although swotor use annotated text to replace handmade animation, also automated light placement during cinematic (maybe automatic camera placement too).