Sony to Bring “Highly-Realistic Faces” to Naughty Dog, Sony Santa Monica and Guerrilla Games

Giuseppe Nelva December 21, 2013 2:30 PM EST

Naughty Dog, Sony Santa Monica Studios and Guerrilla are all working on upcoming games for PS4. We already know that Naughty Dog is working on an Uncharted title, Guerrilla on on a new IP and while only flimsy rumors have been heard about the new game, or games, in development by the folks in Santa Monica. What we do know, now, is that those games might have “highly-realistic” or even photorealistic character faces.

Sony Computer Entertainment America posted a new career opportunity ad seeking Blendshape Artists to work with the Visual Arts Services Group, responsible to work in the faces of the characters for the publisher’s AAA Studios, including the ones mentioned above. Here’s an excerpt:

The Visual Arts Services Group is a division of SCEA’s Product Development Services Group. VASG is a full-production studio located in San Diego that specializes in Animation, Motion Capture, Cinematics, Art and Scanning. We are currently looking for Blendshape Artists to come aboard and work in conjunction with our riggers, the Animation Supervisor and the Art Director to bring highly-realistic faces to life for both cinematic and in-game sequences. The successful candidate will be working with all of the triple A studios like Naughty Dog, Santa Monica Studio (God of War Franchise), Guerrilla and many more! Responsibilities: *The Blendshape Artist will be responsible for bringing highly-realistic faces to life for both cinematic and in-game sequences

*This person will make the final tweaks to the topology edge-flow and determine the final positioning and refinement to key assets such as eyes, teeth, tongue and eyelashes

*When the model face is finalized the artist will sculpt a full array of naturalistic FACs and corrective blendshapes for expressive photorealistic human

*Sculpting a series of high-resolution wrinkle maps to add a final level of polish and nuance to the expressions

For those unfamiliar with 3D modeling and animation, blend shapes are very powerful deformers used in Maya, that create the illusion of a shape changing into another in a realistic and fluid way.

While we still don’t know much about the games that will come out from Sony’s most popular AAA studios, now we can definitely expect them to have some really awesome faces and facial animations.