What can I say? It’s a slow morning…

Zign Creations has created an affordable facial expression recognition application for use with Animation Master, Blender and Poser.  There have also been individual efforts to create import scripts for Max and Maya as well.

At just $119 USD, even amateur animators can afford this:

You can specify virtual facial landmarks and don’t necessarily have to apply reference stickers to the actor’s face.

While adjustment is still necessary once a captured facial animation is applied, this can be a tremendous time savings since it does all the rough-in animation work for you.

But I think I’d find it hard to “act” in front of my webcam though.

Tags: animation master, blender, face recognition, facial animation, poser, zign creations

Dead Space: Downfall

Dead Space: Downfall is the direct-to-DVD animated movie that tells the story of what happened aboard the USG Ishimura prior to the player’s arrival in the Dead Space video game.

The story revolves primarily around Alissa Vincent, security chief of the interplanetary mining vessel USG Ishimura, her team of security officers and their struggle to not only survive, but to save as many of the crew as they can can after terrifying alien creatures are released aboard the Ishimura shortly after a myserious alien artifact is excavated from the planet’s surface and brought aboard.

Despite Film Roman being the lead animation producer, any animation fan will instantly recognize the character design and animation style as being from a Korean animation studio, and indeed,  it is: JM Animation.  If you’re familiar with productions like “The Batman” TV series, the animated Hellboy movies, “Men in Black”, “Jackie Chan Adventures” and so on, you’ll be familiar with JM’s work.

There’s a mix of CG and traditional animation, with CG animation used primarily for vehicular animation and some set piece rendering.  While the CG animation wasn’t anything spectacular, it did the job and didn’t look or feel particularly out of place as it can sometimes when combining traditional and CG animation.

The character animation, however, was noticeably uneven, ranging from fair to good from scene to scene.  To be honest, I’ve seen better, consistent animation on “The Batman” animated series on TV— incidentally also Korean-animated.

They took a “no holds barred” approach with the violence and Downfall is very graphic, with plenty of dismemberment, disembowling and blood spilling to be had.

Story

This is where Downfall comes up a little short, but the film’s makers can’t really be faulted for that because of Downfall’s role as a prelude story.

It does the job of illustrating (and quite graphically too) what happened to the crew of the Ishimura and the colonists of Aegis 7 prior to the player’s arrival in the game.  But ultimately, its hands tied when it comes to revealing more interesting details and story elements since ideally, those are elements that you want revealed to the player during gameplay, not spoiled ahead of time by the movie.

As a result, Downfall doesn’t have a whole lot of depth when it comes to the story, or emotional depth when it comes to its characters and tends to come off as more of a gore-and-carnage showcase really.

Conclusion

Dead Space: Downfall Random Screen Shots

Dead Space game fans are going to get a lot more out of this movie than your regular movie watcher or even animation fans as the gamers will get the backstory which fleshes out the situation they’re facing onboard the Ishimura as they play the game.

As a movie,  Downfall is only fair at best.  It concentrates more on serving up lots of gore and carnage rather than suspenseful horror and compelling characters.

• 2 out of 5

Rent it if you can, but not worth library space unless you’re a completionist Dead Space fan that has some room next to the Collector’s Edition of the game.

Got a headache? Not a problem!

Dead Space is certainly worth the wait!  The game just oozes high quality production values.  Everything from the direction to the sound work is just phenomenal— and the graphics; it goes without saying, although I should mention I’m playing the PC version.

Dead Space utilizes the tried and true survival horror formula: Get stranded, save your significant other/comrades, get out alive (or at least try) and in the process, find out what really happened.

I’ve just started Chapter 2 but I have to take my time due to some motion sickness.  Some games trigger it in me such as Half Life 2 and, unfortunately, Dead Space is another one I’ll have to add to the list.

Thankfully, Dead Space isn’t a run-and-gun type of game.  If it was, I think it might be unplayable for me.

There’s tonnes of information about Dead Space out there so I’ll just nutshell everything.

Ambiance

It may take place in space, but Dead Space has plenty of atmosphere

One can tell easily that everything was carefully chosen to heighten tension.  The shadow-draped, blood and gore-stained rooms and hallways are filled with visual clues that something very very horrible had gone on and the sound effects were carefully chosen, crafted and implemented; everywhere and around you, you can hear things scuttling about or making unnerving noises.

Even the pressure doors have this brief, unnerving screech incorporated into the sound effect used when they open.  Everything serves to heighten the player’s tension and preparing them for those classic sudden scares.

They don’t ignore the psychological element too.  As mentioned, there’s plenty of evidence strewn about the halls of the USG Ishimura; personal affects, evidence of desperate actions, “last stands” and horrible deaths.  You find video logs and audio logs that not only add pieces to the puzzle of what had gone wrong on the Ishimura, but also tease you with glimpses of what horrors you may face.

Despite the rather imposing looking suits that the main character Isaac Clarke can don, the rather effective plasma cutter you’re armed with, and the highly effective abilities you can use like stasis (slows time) and kinesis (remotely move objects), you still feel vulnerable enough not to go charging into rooms and running down hallways with abandon.

Controls

I use a Wacom Graphire tablet and its accompanying mouse.  For Dead Space, I put the tablet in “mouse mode”.  But it seems that Dead Space adds a little bit of acceleration and “ease-out” to the mouse movement making it feel a little too mushy for my tastes.   No doubt this is due to the fact that the game was intended to be played with a game controller.  On the PC, it made precise aiming difficult, and precision aiming is absolutely vital in Dead Space.

The menu control keys are controlled by the cursor keys.  In my opinion, it would have been easier and more convenient to simply map the “WSAD” movement keys to control the menu as well.  I haven’t tried it yet but I guess that should be easy enough to fix using the key mapping configuration menu.

Other than that, I have no real issues with the PC version of the controls in Dead Space.

Conclusion

I think Dead Space easily qualifies as one of the gaming library “must haves.”   The fact that it borrows elements from various sci-fi horror movies (ALIENS, Event Horizon and so on) detracts nothing from the game since those elements are combined and extremely well executed in Dead Space.

Now if only I could play it for longer than 30 minutes at a time…

Also, be on the look out for the Dead Space animated movie: Downfall

Oh, and Dead Space has been banned in Germany, Japan and China… It’s that good.

Apparently there’s a Korean live action film in the works based on the Taekwon V movie.

Taekwon is your basic mad scientist creates army of evil robots for world domination, good scientist counters with a powerful single robot plot.

(L-R) Taekwon V, Mazinger Z, Great Mazinger and Grendizer

At the time of Taekwon V’s creation, the Japanese manga and animated series, Mazinger Z, was very popular in Korea. And you can clearly see the influence in Taekwon’s design.

The upcoming movie purportedly has a budget of 20-billion Won ($17M Cdn) and is slated for release in 2009.