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Question About Ethnicity When Making Video Games



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Xickin

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So as video game technology improves (i.e. Dead Stranding, Cyberpunk) we see more and more actors getting involved and their likenesses being translated over into characters. But I have a question: in God of War, Kratos is a caucasian male, but his facial expressions and body movement come from Christopher Judge, an African American male; so in post-editing, do they have to compensate for the different facial structures based on the difference of their ethnicity? Is it harder or more time consuming because of their differences? Like, Christopher Judge's face is obviously nothing like Kratos', but his expressions are mapped onto the character (and I think Kratos has a more defined face) Am I making any sense? I'm not in the video game industry, but it was a question that popped into my head.
 

AdrianXXII

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It's my understanding that a large part of facial animations are still done by hand. This could be wrong, but i remember the Naughty Dogs extras in Uncharted 2 saying something along those lines.

Though with the advances in technology over the years, they might just take the facial animations from mo-capping now and just clean it up a bit.

Also do expressions even vary all that much, between ethnicities?
 
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I looked it up and the most recent God of War did use motion capture but not from Christopher Judge. His motion capture was provided by the wrestler Shad Gaspard whose features more closely resemble those of the character, though he wasn't Caucasian either.
 

Oracle Spockanort

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If you want to know in general, they will do motion capture of their face then manually adjust the animations.

Auto sync is also a thing that gets used a lot which doesn’t require motion capture at all.

I also want to note that Kratos isn’t Caucasian but is Greek and has Mediterranean features.
 

Xickin

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Also do expressions even vary all that much, between ethnicities?
Well it's the not the expressions themselves but the facial mapping that I'm curious about. Like there's more to ethnicity than just skin colour (how the bones are constructed in a person's face, the shape of their eyes, nose, lips etc.)
I looked it up and the most recent God of War did use motion capture but not from Christopher Judge. His motion capture was provided by the wrestler Shad Gaspard whose features more closely resemble those of the character, though he wasn't Caucasian either.
Really? Huh, because when I looked at behind the scenes stuff the machine was on his face, so I figured it was him providing it.
I also want to note that Kratos isn’t Caucasian but is Greek and has Mediterranean features.
Ack! You're totally right (well now I feel a little silly)
 
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Really? Huh, because when I looked at behind the scenes stuff the machine was on his face, so I figured it was him providing it.
Sorry, I think you're right that Judge did do motion capture for the speaking but Gaspard provided motion capture for fighting.
 

AegisXIII

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It's my understanding that a large part of facial animations are still done by hand. This could be wrong, but i remember the Naughty Dogs extras in Uncharted 2 saying something along those lines.

Though with the advances in technology over the years, they might just take the facial animations from mo-capping now and just clean it up a bit.

Also do expressions even vary all that much, between ethnicities?
No it's not made by hand. Most of games now are made with motion capture. However they separate the body from the face. I used to work for a company that was working on developping solutions for facial motion capture on faces without any need for makup, that's how I know. Great technologies, I can tell you.
 
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