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Naughty Dog shows off Uncharted 2's machinima tools
Perhaps you've heard of Red Vs. Blue? The amateur movie makers at Rooster Teeth used the Halo franchise to launch a rather prolific machinima series, with over 100 episodes constructed from naught but witty dialogue and bobbing cyborg heads. Naughty Dog is hoping the community will take advantage of Uncharted 2 in the same way with its suite of impressive machinima tools. Most will use the in-game recording to show off their best multiplayer moments, but the truly dedicated will be enticed by what Uncharted 2 can offer. Players can place Drake in front of a green screen, for example, and queue up various animations and camera angles. Taking that footage, a professional video editor can transplant Drake into the Sex and the City movie or an old episode of Power Rangers -- the possibilities are endless! In addition, players can don a headset when doing facial close-ups. The animation system is intelligent enough to turn your audio stream into lip syncing for the on-screen characters. For added authenticity, you can even hire Nolan North to voice Drake. It should be pretty easy, considering he seemingly never turns down a role ever. Check out the tools in motion after the break. [Thanks, bumblo!]
New Sega tool automates 3D lip-syncing
Nothing takes away from a good, in-game voice acting performance than lip-syncing that looks like it came from a badly dubbed kung fu movie. But what developer wants to go through the painstaking process of modeling every minute mouth movement? That's where Sega comes in, with a new software tool that analyzes a voice sample and automatically matches a characters facial movements to the spoken words. The tool can even reportedly detect "happiness, anger, surprise and sadness" in the voice and change the character's facial expression accordingly.Of course, Sega's lip-syncing solution isn't the only one out there, but this new tool reportedly "increased efficiency nearly 100-fold" in internal tests. That leaves plenty of time for more important things, like selling your body on the street to pay the tool's 207,900 yen ($1,862) asking price. That might be chump change for the big guys, but bedroom programmers should work on their come hither smile.
