L. A. Noire takes place in Los Angeles in the late 1940s, the typical milieu for film noir. The city is experiencing an economic boom and Hollywood is at the very beginning of its golden era. But all the glitz and glamour have a negative side, i.e. rampant crime. GIs traumatised by war return to the city without any prospects, and corruption, fraud and murder are spreading rapidly. Players take on the role of one of these returning war veterans – a guy who’s trying to make it as a police detective by solving a series of cases based on actual crimes from that era.

Absolutely Realistic Gestures and Facial Expressions

The special thing about these cases is that players don’t solve them via clues found at the scene of the crime or collected on scavenger hunts through the city. Indeed, Rockstar teamed up with the Australian studio Team Bondi to come up with something very special. All of the game’s characters were played by actors, and their gestures and facial expressions were transferred in detail to the faces of their digital counterparts. MotionScan, a new technology for capturing and integrating actors’ movements makes it possible for L. A. Noire and players themselves to analyse each and every nuance in the behaviour and facial expression of their interlocutor and to recognise if and when they are lying.

“We’ve long since had the ability to make houses and cars look realistic”, notes Brendan McNamara, studio head at Team Bondi, “but it’s much more difficult with faces, especially within the performance parameters of a normal computer”. While regular movements were captured largely using normal, marker-based motion capturing, the movements of the head were generated separately using MotionScan, a technology that goes far beyond motion capturing and uses a grid of data points. Real actors are filmed, scanned and projected onto the digital characters. MotionScan uses 32 high-definition cameras that completely surround the actors and record their movements in 30 images per second. The cameras not only record their faces but also their gestures and movements in a space consisting of a number of perspectives, including from below and above. These data are calculated to form a model and even the smallest of details and movements are transferred to the digital characters.

An All-Encompassing Love of Detail

The two studios show their eye for detail in the design of the game world as well. Everything is depicted as authentically as possible in the style of the 1940s. The developer also sought out colour patters from the era to enhance their own colour palette. Members of Team Bondi travelled from Australia to L. A. to photograph historical buildings in Los Angeles that haven’t changed in 60 years. This task was often fraught with danger for the photographers, one of whom was chased away by drunkards and gang members.

But all their efforts were worth it: “Sometimes there’s no better model than reality itself”, says Simon Wood. The team used additional reference material from more obscure sources: “I acquired old ‘Home & Garden’ magazines on eBay along with a number of editions of Architectural Digest, Sears catalogues and interior design manuals from the 1940s”, explains Woods. The result was a series of so-called “product bibles”, a type of manual for the production design team for all locations in the game. The final locations consist of a mixture of reference material and their own carefully adapted designs.

The characters’ costumes are also based on designs taken from reality. Team Bondi hired costume designer Wendy Cork to design the clothes worn by the characters. These clothes were captured using full-body 3D scanners. This gave the team high-resolution models with which they were able to simulate in detail the fabric and structure of the clothing. The developers ended up with a wide variety of scanned clothing and 3D models with which they could exchange and combine shaders to outfit their digital L.A. And yet, the models provided by the costume designer were still not enough to satisfy Team Bondi’s love of detail: “We went ahead and got all conceivable props from all of Hollywood’s biggest prop stores”, explains Woods. And, seeing as art director Chee Kin also had to develop realistic lighting for the characters, the team also generated different light sources. The team also had to get their hands on everyday objects from the era in order to be able to realistically illustrate each location. The result is a game world that feels entirely real, no matter whether players are searching the apartment of a suspect, talking to a barkeep in a pub or investigating lipstick traces at the scene of a brutal crime.