March 7th, 2012
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During a presentation at GDC 2012, Heavy Rain developer Quantic Dream revealed their new engine, an engine set to redefine motion capture technology, and it’s built to run on the PlayStation 3. Below studio founder David Cage talks about how the new engine gives his team the ability to use 65 cameras during the motion capture process. In comparison, Heavy Rain’s engine allowed for the use of 28 cameras.
“So we invested a lot in our motion capture studio. Heavy Rain was shot with 28 cameras, and we’ve upgraded the studio to 65 cameras. Cage told Eurogamer. “Now we can shoot several actors – their body and their face – at the same time. It’s not a small change, but at the same time this is how Avatar and Tintin were shot, and it’s how the CG industry works because they know how much you gain from shooting face, voice and body at the same time.”
Below you will find the first demonstration of the new engine in action along with some quotes from studio founder David Cage [via PlayStation Blog]. This technology will be used to power Quantic Dream’s next PlayStation 3 title. The demo is called “Kara”, and while you watch, keep in mind the footage presented is running in real-time on a PlayStation 3 and is a year old.
After Heavy Rain, we wanted to push the envelope in terms of quality, starting with the visuals. We wanted to improve many things — things that were not possible with the Heavy Rain engine. So we had to develop a new engine from scratch.
We also wanted to improve the quality of the acting. With Heavy Rain, we did what many games do — split performances, recording a voice on one side and a body animation on the other, putting everything together and crossing your fingers that you get a consistent performance. It worked okay for Heavy Rain, but you lose a lot of a performance by splitting into two and rebuilding it artificially.
We wanted to do what Avatar did by having one full performance where we capture everything at the same time. And we wanted to demonstrate these new performance capture techniques and the new engine before going into production, so we developed a short showcase that would allow us to test these ideas and technologies. This is how “Kara” was created.
“Kara” is not our next game. It’s not the character, it’s not the world, it’s not the story. …We do things in a very strange way here, things that have nothing to do with the games we make. But I think that’s a part of the DNA of the studio, and hopefully something that people like about us – they never know what they’re going to get!
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Amazing what Quantic Dream’s new engine is capable of on PS3!
meanwhile, Microsoft made a shopping cart
Hey, it’s not like making game consoles and developing games are the only thing they do. They have different departments with each focus on different objectives, don’t they? One of their departments happened to be making an enhanced shopping cart, so what? One of their first party video game developers are working on Halo 4…
The trend for PS3 now is all new IPs if you havent noticed. Fucking hell Halo 4?? Thats what i call money milking from a dead cow.
I can tell this engine was made to run on the over priced internet ready blu ray player….blan textures, washed out color, slightly blurry. Yeah, definately made to run on the over priced internet ready blu ray player.
“Xbox 360 is the B E S T console E V E R made.” –John Carmack
Yo, Buying dumbtard! I just found this quote in Wikipedia about the PS3:
Sony has made the best machine. It’s the best piece of hardware, without question. – Dave Perry
Should we use it as a signature as well?
Back on topic, your over priced internet ready diskless DVD player 720p limited can only dream to run anything like that. The pS3 has still much juice to be squeezed as more and more developers (developers. Not the monkey boys at Bethesda and Bioware) are stating. And showing. The last of us will blow your junkbox away once for all.
Pretty decent for something that was done a year ago. I’m pretty impressed with the latter half of the video, the acting stirred up my emotions quite a bit. It would be nice to see a game done based on the idea presented in this tech demo.
the engine is phenomenal in every way.
but i truly have to agree with your sentiments on the second half of the demo, i think it would make a great game if they could do it properly, it certainly stirred up emotions with me as well
No doubt, and since the folks at Quantic Dream said that this tech demo was created a year ago while the engine is only capable of 50% of what it is now, I can’t help but be excited at how amazing a full game, powers by this engine, would be.
Amazing that the first party studios at Sony can make so great things on the ps3.
technically they’re second party as they develop for sony exclusively but are still independent
WOW , I’m speechless how this demo runs !!!
I hope there will be next heavy rain for PS3!
Wow! It’s true that sentient androids looking for existential answers are nothing new in SciFi (Blade Runner or Ghost in the Shell anyone?), but this tech demo is really brilliant both technically and story-telling wise. I hope it will develope in a full game sooner or later!
Awsome!This is one of the meany reasons i bought a ps3 as you get a handful of games companies who realy make the ps3 chipset shine,Also the story was verry touching indeed,”Quantic Dreams Goodluck with this project.
Truly fucking amazing, and I’m not just talking about visuals, the emotion conveyed in that piece brought a tear to my eye. The future of gaming is to excite real emotion and I think these guys are getting close.
This is very interesting. The clip was cool, and I’m real curious as to what type of game this could lead to. It would be another awesome PS3 exclusive to mark down.
boggles the mind if we consider that qd are not one of sony’s 1st party developers. heavy rain is visually still the most impressive ps3 game (realistic art direction) to date. i love the french guys, they’re willing to take risks, innovate and even produce new engines.
And in the meantime Microsoft brags about Halo 4.. what a bunch of wankers!!
You cant beat PS3 best ever dream about this PC lover
This looks like it has the potential to be an amazing story driven game. It reminded me a little bit of I, Robot.
I didn’t play Heavy Rain, but I did play the demo. While I am all for story heavy games and things like that, the game didn’t seem to interest me. That’s not to say it wasn’t an amazing game, I just didn’t get too interesting. I didn’t get into L.A. Noire either….although I didn’t play that game at all to begin with.
That said, I didn’t find the motion capture to be as amazing as people made it sound. Was is bad? Not at all, but it definitely wasn’t mind blowing and amazing. I might have been expecting something unfeasible, but still.
The dissappointment is probably more my fault than the dev’s so it’s fine.