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Why ‘Rise of the Tomb Raider’ devs worried about Lara Croft having ‘too many human qualities’
Game development has come a long way from the days of making yellow circles eat white dots while being chased by ghosts, and these days it is getting harder to tell the difference between a game studio and a movie studio.
California-based Crystal Dynamics, the developer behind the upcoming Rise of the Tomb Raider, found that even though it has the technology and resources to make Lara Croft look more lifelike than ever before, hyperrealism is not always the best style for a game.
“[At one point] Lara started to look too much like Camilla,” Chief Technology Officer Gary Snethen told Polygon. Camilla Luddington is Lara Croft’s current voice actress and motion capture performer.
“Things were almost too real,” Snethen continued. “We had to bring her back, to make her a video game character again and give her that iconic look. She started taking on too many human qualities. It kind of took away from her character.”
While Luddington portrayed Lara Croft in Crystal Dynamics’ 2013 game Tomb Raider, the character has existed since the 1996 game of the same name. Lara has her own look, and the developers found that as the character model looked more like Luddington, she started to look less like Lara.
The primary cause for this was the performance capture technology used on Luddington, which tracked her facial expressions during her performances for more realistic animation on the character’s face. To solve this problem, the character artists were forced to reshape Lara by hand.
“Moving onto a new console and having new blend shape tech, we wanted to rebuild our facial system from the ground up,” said Senior Technical Artist Jon Robins. “We looked at as much reference as possible from Camilla and general female facial features in scans and video. We wanted to make Lara as believable as possible and a solid way of doing that is bringing more of our actor to our model so that we could fully convey the emotion Camilla brings.”
He added, “Our first tests of this yielded great results and brought a lot more to some of the scenes than we thought they would.”
Polygon’s full article goes in-depth with the process Crystal Dynamics went through to make sure Lara Croft looked real, but not too real.
Screenshot via “THE RECONSTRUCTION OF LARA CROFT” | Polygon
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