It was only recently that we got a first look at Nvidia's impressive face rendering technology and during the unveiling of the PS4, we saw Quantic Dreams' excellent looking old man face. Now Activision is joining the throng of digital skin makers, releasing a bunch of screenshots and a new bald man pulling funny faces.
All of this was unveiled at Games Developer Conference 2013 where it was made clear that this guy really likes yoghurt and doesn't want his frozen fruit to dominate his desserts. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq1Nq2Zvv0Y']
While the teeth look a little odd when his mouth is open, the rubbery look of the face is really quite impressive. Wrinkle lines appear when he smiles and the skin changes shape around the eyeballs as they move. The range of facial motion is really excellent, with a lot of authentic looking muscles at work under the digital framework.
Activision also showed off some stills of a much older gentleman, with deeper wrinkles – who looks a little more game-like – and a young lady who looks impressively real.
Of course if this face rendering tech is anything like Nvidia's, it needs over half the power of a Titan GPU in order to run it, so we're not likely to see this sort of graphic fidelity in the next shooter, but perhaps in a year or so we could see it crop up in smaller games where there won't be huge backdrops to render too.
KitGuru Says: Who's excited for something like this in the next LA Noire game? The original was pretty good but with something like this, I'll catch those lying Bas%*%^$.