   Lip sync in games
  Was just watching the Alpha Protocol trailer on tv and I decided to post this because I have never seen a game do lip sync well.What are the problems? As I see it and can guess:Too much blending between frames. Lips move so fast when talking but in games they seem to move slower.Using exaggerated key frames. The mouths are too wide/open. Mouths don't move that much when talking, only when yelling.Any ideas as to why lip sync still sucks?   
  I imagine it's because games use a software based solution that guesses at the user's expression. To do it well they'd need to do video capture of the voice actor which probably costs more money and takes longer to implement.   ;  There are basically ways to get lip sync into games:A) Mocap everythingB) Animate by handC) Use software to create the animationsA is the most expensive option, because it needs a lot of acting, mocapping and animation tweaking. It's used in movie production and produces the best result, because if done right, it'll look exactly like the actor did it.B is also very expensive, because it needs a lot of animators and probably reference material. I believe this is never done for humanoid faces anymore, because A and C are either better or cheaper.C is used in computer games a lot, because it is fairly cheap and generic. The animator creates a bunch of poses ("visemes") for the face for each type of sound ("phonemes"). The software analyses the sound (and possibly also text and additional meta data) to create the data how to blend these poses together to get the final pose. This works pretty well, and can even be done in realtime.It also looks very generic and machine like, because every given set of phonemes will look the same every time. A lot of it's effectiveness also depends on the facial poses (and it takes a _lot_ of tweaking to get the them right). One set of poses will only work for a certain way of speaking, i.e. talking calmly, but not for others like screaming. One could make several sets of poses for different types of speak, blend those together and add some general expression poses for various emotions, but it gets complicated and messy very quickly.Having said all that, I believe that lipsync is actually not a very important aspect of games. When thinking back about games I played or am currently playing, I can't tell you which have bad lipsync and which have good lipsync, because I don't even notice.This may just be, but I guess this applies to a lot of people, so time spent on getting lipsync to perfection is not well spent time. And for productions that have infinite time and money, there's always option A.;  maybe my expectations have been lowered way too much over the years, but I though Red Dead Redemption did a really good job 90% of the time.   ;Quote:Original post by RattenhirnHaving said all that, I believe that lipsync is actually not a very important aspect of games. That depends on audience. Alan Wake recently got blasted for poor lip sync. It is/was also an issue with Guitar Hero. Mass Effect 2 also made many improvements over first part.And lip sync only goes as far, in current stage, it's already as good as it gets. Anything more requires full facial mimic, and those are still far too complex problems (see Avatar, Curious Case of Benjamin Button and similar) for such purposes.   