For “TLOU2” we raised the bar for in-game dialogue.

We gave each line specific facial and gesture animations.

I was the system owner for this process on the design team.

Process

Our animation team built a toolbox of conversation gestures and emotional facial poses for each major character. We used them to breath life into all of the dialogue spoken during gameplay.

We had three levels of polish depending on the importance of the conversion.

  1. Systemic Facial Animation - each line was flagged with an emotion in our VO database and the system would dynamically bend the facial animation.

  2. Hand Scripted Gestures - a designer or animator would control each of the characters movement through scripting. This is was an additive layer that didn’t impede the characters normal movement.

  3. Fine Scripting - a designer would alter the characters behaviors to better deliver their lines and further refine the facial animation timings to reflect when a characters emotions change over the course of a line.

 

Showcase

Each of these are scenes I scripted to the 3rd level of polished detailed above.

They were our training examples for ramping up the rest of the design team to use this process.

 
 
 
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