Moving lips for cutscenes

- it's no big deal. just wanted to bring it up.

Meh, if you had to pick between having someone working on chapter 2 or someone animating lips, what would you pick

- it's no big deal. just wanted to bring it up.

And synchronized to which language?

Being an animator myself I can tell you that you really don't want this to happen. As you've hopefully noticed, Guild Wars uses the actual game engine for its cut-scenes. That means that to be capable of lip-syncing in those cut-scenes the game engine itself is gonna have to have all that added animation information tagging along while you're playing. Trust me, that would be a lot of useless baggage information slowing down your play. I say more baddies on one map than some moving mouths! ...since that, or something similar, would be the trade off.

this is because it is one of the most difficult things to do in animation.

Not really... it just requires a lot of nit-picky detail. The more detail, the slower your engine can render it. I'd rather have more detail in the form of more objects on the map rather than lips and a mouth that won't be used 90% of the time.

yah maybe I should have said pain in the arse. More appropriate.

But am I off base here? I thought this was a difficult area for animators.

good point. You're right - the same engine is used in the cutscenes. That's a logical thing to do, since last minute changes in character models won't mandate a manual reworking of cutscenes otherwise.

I guess it'll be another 5 or 6 years before I can see my characters grimace in pain or rage in gameplay battle. Until then I'll settle for stoicism.

How about Japanese? "Oh no! It's Godzirra!"

Main screen turn on.

Maybe difficult for some animators, but I personally find it a world easier than many other aspects of animation... particularly particle effects. -_-

I agree. It is kind of wierd when they talk and their mouths are closed.

I don't see why lipsync in cutscenes would have any affect on gameplay whatsoever tbh. All you'd need to do is make the game engine swap out the regular ingame character models for the cutscene models with all the extra animation routines and mouth polygons during cutscenes. You certainly wouldn't have all that crap going on while you were actually playing the game...

Considering how technically advanced this game is in all other respects, I think lipsync is a bit of a glaring omission. Granted, its to save time and money, but it should be added in in Chapter 2 imo.

Lipsync by no means has to be as good as Half Life 2, but if you've ever played Dawn of War, the ingame models there have rudimentary lipsync which I think would be a good level for Guild Wars to aim for.

I agree completely.

The thing is they currently don't do a swapping of character models just for the cut-scenes, so I doubt we'll see it in the next chapter either. I really would like to though!

Aye, it'll never happen and I know it, but a Man can dream!

going out on a limb here, but were you, by chance, referencing an episode of Futurama right there? If not, forget I asked...

Heh, that sounds about right. I don't always remember where I get my sayings from, but I think you nailed that one right there. On this instance however I'm not referring to the fing-longer

I heard the professor speaking your text as I read it - lol

its not needed but it would be really nice to see... sometimes i think maybe this is based in the grim future where people can read other's thoughts