I was looking at the fine looking video of Heavy Rain, and (whilst it looks good), the mouth animations are corny, and the teeth are borderline creepy.  This is a really common issue.  ALL of the super heavily hyped games suffer from this - even the recent ones like Killzone 2, This got me thinking....

From a techical standpoint, what are the hurdles to getting the mouth animations to actually look realistic - with non creepy looking teeth especially?

How soon can we expect to see this?

Any ideas?

Thanks!

cover them with masks! wow...that was surprisingly easy. i deserve a raise.

There are hundreds of small facial expressions which communicate a person's emotions ... The more realistic a face looks the more we look for these subtile clues into what a person is thinking, and (even though developers can afford to model the face) they do not have the time or money to animate all the motions or subtile changes in a person's skin color which we expect from real people, and the results of their efforts often look odd and creepy.

So, the answer to "when" would be "never", or "only with a lot of extra time and money, so on rare, high budget games played on far future hardware."

Could a developer create a middleware "facial animation engine", that could be licenced, much like Havok? I must admit that the poor animation of faces really takes you out of the mood - if the art style is "realistic" that is.

Actually if you sit and look at someone's mouth movements and nothing else, they are in fact pretty strange and don't always seem to match up. You just don't notice it because you are focusing on other areas of the face.

Take a look at Valve. They've done a good job with character expressions and animations and I thier games are hyped (especially if we look back to 2004 and Half-Life 2).

Oh, add Call of Duty 4 to that your list of bad games too. I recall that their faces wouldn't fully match up with what they're saying.

I understand what your saying, but you have to understand that the face is one of the hardest things to model realistically. Plus, it is really difficult to render skin in general, plus the added 'softness' required for lips, and the teeth. Just be happy that we have it looking as good as it is. A few years ago, we still had lobster pincers for hands, and mouths were sown shut. Also, the creepiest 100 mile stare, with the awkward blink every now and then.

Oh, I agree, but it is BECAUSE everything else is coming along so well, that the issue is exacerbated.  We will never reach photo-realism unless this - one of the most fundumental forms of human communication - can be properly rendered.

@ illegalpalladin ---- Also, just because Half-Life 2 was acclaimed does not mean it did a good job at it.  Only that it did exceptionally well in comparison to other games and given the technology at its disposal.  AND, I never said COD or Heavy Rain or Killzone 2 was bad merely because of the facial animation.  In fact, I specifically said that the overall product was good.  There is no reason for a combatative hasty generalization because someone pointed out an obvious short coming in a video game.

Why so serious? 

You read that wrong. I'm not saying that games that have weird facial animations like Call of Duty 4 and Killzone 2 are bad, but they are games where it looks bad.

So Valve has done better than many other game developers, but they still haven't done a good job of it? I'd say that Valve is one of the top in this area even if their games aren't the best graphically.

Do you know how many muscles it takes to smile?! .....me neither.