A technology question

[Noone]

As far as I understan you developed your own lypsinc/facial animation technology. But IMHO lypsinc in CI looks a bit discreet. Each phonema is quite seen on the face. I know that the game was long in development, so can your engine now make more smooth lypsinc animation?

There were also some screens showing the use of the engine for cinematics. Models depicted on these screens have more polygons the in CI. I've heard you are working on a new game - will the models have more polygons there?

[Burak]

Hi Alex,

We've made plenty of progress in our lipsnyching technology since we implemented it in Culpa Innata. Unfortunately, with the graphics engine we used in CI, it was not possible to do more. The engine we used in CI was part audio training, part text based technology. Now we developed a newer technology, solely based on audio, independent of language used. Also the smoothness is much improved, with better algorithms to blend the phonemes/visemes.

Hopefully you guys will experience all this in upcoming titles.

I could not understand the question in the second paragraph. Could you rephrase it please?

Burak

[Noone]

Just wanted to ask why have you chosen to use not so many polygones in models in CI while your engine is supposingly can work with models consisting of greater number of polygones.

[Burak]

Actually the number of polygones are the same for the game play and the cinematics in CI. Certain NPC's in the game had lower polygons than talking characters. The decision was mostly based on the total number of polygons per scene. In a small scene with less characters, we used more polygons. Otherwise, we used less. The 3D graphics engine also had its limitations.

In upcoming titles, however, the polygon/texture qualities will be much different of course. Larger textures and higher number of polygones. We've been working on better human emotion animation techniques for the last two years, and I can tell you that our characters will be considerably more emotional in the titles to come.

[shae]

Do the newer iterations of the engine have some sort of dynamic LOD, at least for the models?