Animate an extinct wolf, capture a master’s katana blows. From Motion Capture to altered physics, behind the realism of the Ghost of Yōtei video game
There is a cinematographic kolossal technology.
Like a journey through time. Ghost of yōteithe sucker punch video game released on October 2nd for PlayStation 5, immerses the player in Japan of 1603, near the Mountain of Yōtei on the island of Hokkaido, making him enter the role of Atsu, a woman who wants to avenge the killing of her loved ones with the white weapon.
But how do you recreate such a distant reality in such a convincing way, not only geographically, brushing every pixel to give life to an uncontaminated nature, to humans and digital animals, shaping fights that seem movies with stuntman in flesh and bones?
“The game must seem epic but the resources of the development team, of medium size, are limited, and so you have to adopt different strategies”, explains the creative director Jason Connell. “For the interlude scenes, in which the movement and acting of the characters acquire the scenic value of a real film, we use the motion capture: that is, we capture the movements and facial expressions, thanks to dots designed on the faces and special cameras, of the interpreters who embody the characters (in the case of Atsu is the actress Erika Ishii, ed.), In addition to their vocal performance in a vocal performance in a vocal performance in a True enormous installation theater.
However, not everything can be recreated from real data, especially when it comes to animals. “For horses we used the movement data already captured for the previous game Ghost of Tsushimabut for the wolf Ezo (one of the two now extinct subspecies of the Hokkaido wolf, ed.) We could not be based on an existing specimen, and so the animators animators to animate every detail “.
The work then becomes complex for fighting based mainly on swords, spears, throwing daggers, arches with arrows and so on.
“We worked with white weapon masters: one came to the studio to extract a sword, to capture the movement on the computer, but it did so fast that we could not record it, so we asked him to slow it down. To make the fight more varied not only are there different weapons, but we studied in the animation different moves for each.
However, in a video game it is not like in a film, where the coordinator of the stunt prepares the choreography of the duel with the actors before turning it, because in this case it is the player who decides how to attack and defend. Therefore we first prepare all the animations of the movements based on those performed by real weapon experts, and then we leave the player to choose the type of attack, working on the simulation of the enemies that will respond with an appropriate movement, for example a parade “.
The last piece, in a realistic key, is that of the reproduction of the laws of physics to move, for example, trees or flowers, shaken by the wind: “In this case they exist in the game of software that replicates what happens in reality, in nature but also when a cloak flutter here and there”, says Connell. “However, more than to realism, we aim for what the movement in the environment can express, as in a film by Akira Kurosawa, in which for example a immobile samurai is surrounded by chaos, and this gives it an aura of invincibility. That’s why sometimes we alter those laws of perfect and credible physics, for example of the leaves that fall from a maple during a storm, because everything seems incredibly more engaging”.
