We’ve just looked at the Epic Games Unreal Engine 4 demo videos from the 2013 Game Developers Conference (GDC). Now here’s another 3D demonstration video, showing off some new technology from Activision, which takes a completely different approach to next-gen visuals - at least in its subject matter. Epic’s engine showed sci-fi and fantasy visuals with lots of effects such as glows, flare-outs and mucky lens jiggery-pokery. In contrast Activision has attempted to bring us a demo showing animated human faces in crystal clear HD clarity.
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Activision has supplied a stunning range of images and also an amazing video showing its new 3D engine in action. The video demo below was running on a PC with a GeForce GTX 680 graphics card installed. Towards the end of the video you will see Activision turn off the skin textures so that the man’s face mesh is revealed in animation. (I wonder if the demo was running on a top-of-the-range AMD graphics card the man might have had a luxurious barnet powered by TressFX?)
Activision informs us that the demo video is running at 180 fps on the aforementioned GeForce GTX 680 powered PC. Nvidia also showed the same face “Digital Ira” in a (Titan) tech demo but Activision’s example was “rendered using a completely different tech” and it seems to be much more efficient, it ran at much higher FPS on lesser hardware.
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Jorge Jiminez fronted the Activision presentation and said “For us, the challenge goes beyond entertaining; it's more about creating a medium for better expressing emotions, and reaching the feelings of the players.” He added “We believe this technology will bring current generation characters into next generation life.”
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Adding one and one together VRZone speculates that Activision may have some place for this new 3D face rendering tech in the next-gen Call of Duty titles. Beyond the PC, however, Activision made no mention of this engine being usable on any current or future console systems.
There are more details and many more high-res pictures available on Jorge Jiminez’s blog.
