Sometimes you learn something that just blows your mind. Take Uncharted 2 for instance – for many it was game of the year in 2010 and it took the cinematic presentation of the first game and expanded on it in every conceivable way.
A well known interesting fact is that the game delivers its visuals by pre-calculating a lot of the maths that would normally be done by the graphics chip alone… thus leaving the RSX free to leverage its grunt at simply drawing the image. 120 million polygons per frame are drawn by the Cell and passed across to the chip – and the best-in-class motion blur and depth of field effects are both solely the work of the Cell, too.
What you might not know though, is while the game uses motion capture for some of the animation, all of the facial animation for the cutscenes, including the lip syncing, was all animated BY HAND.
When I saw this in Edge I actually had to read the sentence three times to make sure I'd seen it correctly.
Naughty Dog… I salute thee.
P.S. Can we have a new Jak and Daxter now, please?
