Don’t you hate it when your super-realistic games have characters that are so… “plastic?” Their elbows, wrists, and knuckles don’t bend, and their face moves about as much as the CG image from Bruno the Kid. Now, Sega’s Magical V Engine tool is available on sale through March to developers for ¥155,400 and it should help this problem. Magical V is a software tool designed to render facial expressions based on pre-recorded speech. It analyzes vocal tone and conveys it with the proper facial emotion (happiness, anger, surprise, or sadness) in the mouth, eyebrows, and eyes.
It’s basically an automatic lip syncing development tool, designed to have the character follow the audio. Maybe now that developers including Sega itself can spend less money on manually matching up facial expressions to the voice acting, they’ll have the budget to hire some real voice-acting talent for their games, hm?
