ASTRAL CHAIN - devblog: Facing Down Challenges

Hello. I’m Takahiro Iwagami, the cinematic artist in charge of facial animation for ASTRAL CHAIN. Today I’d like to tell you all a bit about the main characters’ facial movements!

The characters in ASTRAL CHAIN were designed by a famous manga artist named Masakazu Katsura. I knew I had to make these characters expressive and emotional enough to do his designs justice – lest I incur the wrath of his many fans! I spent a lot of time poring over Katsura’s work, from artbooks to manga like ZETMAN and Tiger and Bunny, to let the expressiveness of his characters really sink in.

The main character of ASTRAL CHAIN isn’t completely unvoiced; you can hear them calling out to their Legion as they fight. However, the main character doesn’t have any dialogue of their own in the main story cutscenes. Before I started animating anything at all, director Takahisa Taura and I discussed what overall impressions each character’s facial expressions should have. Taura told me, “I want players to be able to project themselves onto the player character, so they naturally feel like part of the game. So don’t give the player character any extreme expressions that might give them too much of a predefined personality.”

Throughout my animation career, I’d always taken it for granted that each character should move with a distinct rhythm, and have striking poses that are all their own. This was the first time I’d had to make facial animation for a character with no dialogue – and a main character, at that! Making expressions that met both Taura’s expectations and my own personal standards took a lot of time. Not to mention all the trial and error that went into animating all the other characters’ faces, too!

Full post here!