We're launching a new project!

I’m sure many of you are familiar with Adam Jensen. He hails from the role-playing game series Deus Ex, which, in my opinion, is one of the best games ever made. With a dense atmosphere and a tangible cyber world that reacted to my decisions as a player, I’m thrown into a conspiracy involving influential individuals, corporations, and politicians, and slowly uncover the full depth of the story. At the heart of this world is the concept of human augmentation: artificial body parts that are more capable than our original ones. Added to this is a socially critical backdrop that asks „What happens to the people who can’t keep up technologically?“

Back when Adam Jensen first appeared in Deus Ex: Human Revolution in 2011, the dystopia seemed like a distant prospect. Today, its message couldn’t be more relevant. So it’s no wonder that an AI also takes the stage as an antagonist in the game: Eliza Cassan - actually a prominent news anchor who, over the course of the game, turns out to be an all-powerful, hyper-intelligent AI pulling the strings behind the scenes and deceiving the player - Jensen - on several occasions.

Eliza, in turn, is a clever homage to a computer program developed by Joseph Weizenbaum between 1964 and 1966 that simulates a humanistic psychotherapist. Interestingly, the chatbot of that time enjoyed unexpectedly high popularity among test patients and was even preferred over real psychotherapists in some cases due to its non-judgmental communication and seemingly human behavior. This is also described as the Eliza effect.

The conflict between Eliza Cassan and Adam Jensen in Deus Ex, as well as these two characters themselves, made a strong impression on me even back then. While researching AI tools that are becoming increasingly powerful, I realized the parallels to Eliza and Jensen. This material provides the ideal foundation for testing out these new tools while telling this story as a narrative in its own right. To do this, we’ll move the characters a bit further into their future. Jensen will be a bit older, and Eliza won’t be quite the same as she is in the game either. They’ve known each other for quite some time now and have their own plans…

What Has Happened So Far

It all started when I remodeled and rigged the character again as a Blender learning project. I tried to stay as close to the original as possible. If you look at Adam's hair, for example, you can see that he has almost the same hairstyle as in the game, but this time it's based on Blender's particle hair system.

Building on that, the next step was: “How photorealistically can I recreate Adam?” I was inspired by Chris Jones, who has produced some truly amazing results. This part is nearly complete and will be explored in more detail in a separate article.

What's Next

Next, we plan to partially remodel and partially reimagine three additional characters for this project: Elisa, the AI from Deus Ex, and two members of the Prague Police. After that, we’ll finalize the film’s screenplay, which is currently still in the concept phase. We’re planning a short article on this as well. Then we’ll begin building the three sets where the short story takes place. Next comes the animation of the characters - I’m really curious to see how well text-to-animation works and how usable video-to-mocap results already are. We’ve already worked with this in the past.

Finally - and I’m not even sure yet how well this will work - we’re going to try to push the limits of photorealism. We’re curious to see which final look will turn out to be the right one.

See you then, Winni & Doreen.