Comment Re: I must be old (Score 1) 87
"I'm pretty confident the winners of the competitions for the last few years (a) don't have the same flexibility for artists working with their demo engines as Square-Enix does and (b) would never be able to assemble enough assets and people to do the facial expression stuff with anywhere near the same quality (an area in which, AFAIK, Nvidia has been almost entirely pioneering.)"
Actually, they've had the assets and more for a LONG time. Procedural generation eliminates the need for a LOT of work, can be done with a HUGE degree of detail, takes up ungodly tiny amounts of space, and yes, we've had facial emotional animation in demoscene projects well matching up with stuff like LA Noire.