Summary
Bethesda is known for making massive universes, likeStarfieldandSkyrim, filled to the brim with detail and places to explore, but there are two sections where the studio tends to fall short. One is graphical fidelity, and another is animation quality.Starfieldsuffers from the latter, especially when it comes to the animation quality of characters. When stacked up against something likeBaldur’s Gate 3(which came out in the same year), there is something uncanny about the characters' facial animations.
Starfielduses Bethesda’s new Creation Engine 2 to make its visuals better than the titles that came before it.
The uncanny valleyis a common, unsettling feeling people get in which characters or androids closely resemble humans but aren’t convincingly realistic. The closer a character resembles a human but has something that doesn’t convince the eye that it is real, like an animation, the more uncanny it is. This feeling only occurs if a character is at least somewhat realistic since it isn’t triggered when characters are heavily stylized. Due to its aesthetic,the uncanny valley is something thatStarfield’s characters suffer fromand is further highlighted by the camera zooming in on their faces.
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The Detail That Could Explain Starfield’s Uncanny Valley Vibes
It’s Subtle And Easily Missed
Animating faces is difficult, and it becomes even more difficult when the face is detailed enough to imitate real life.When a certain muscle doesn’t move when it should, people immediately notice that something is offbecause of the brain’s ability to recognize other human faces and their movements, but they can’t always tell why it looks so creepy. InStarfield’s case, one of the muscles that don’t move is the orbicularis oculi muscle (the muscle that overlies the orbital rim and eyelids).
Without proper contraction of the eyes, a character cannot have a Duchenne smile, which is often considered to be a genuine smile. This is specifically whatStarfieldlacks.
The eyes of NPCs don’t contract correctly when a character smiles, which triggers the uncanny valley feeling immediately and is further highlighted when the camera zooms in during dialogue. Eye movement seems to be an issue in general withStarfield’s characters, and the facial animation issues could perhaps be attributed to the lack of motion capture. Bethesda has stated that it doesn’t use motion capture information and has stuck with hand-keying its animations with real-life references.
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Bethesda Could Improve Its Animation In The Future
There Are Ways To Improve Facial Animations
Should Bethesda choose to use motion capture in the future, it could help to alleviate the uncanny feeling seen inStarfield. Motion capture isn’t the animation fix that many believe, since the motion capture information needs to be tweaked and refined after being received. Small fixes that animators may not notice or not have time to do, like the contracting of the orbicularis oculi when smiling, could be solved with motion capture and help Bethesda avoid the uncanny valley feeling with its future titles.
