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Animate your characters like real people if you want real people to care about them.
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I'll bet the majority of times you see the hand-gesture thing, it's because the animator was told "make us a vague generalized animation which we can use during every conversation with every NPC, everywhere"
And when faced with the thought that this animation would be seen constantly, the realistic animator would create something described as "standing mostly still."
Nintendo Network ID: unclesporky
Ah yes, "Mass Effect animations".
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"Did ya hear the one about the mussel that wanted to purchase Valve? Seems like the bivalve had a juicy offer on the table but the company flat-out refused and decided to immediately clam up!"
It is ok if it goes unnoticed. It adds to the entire game whether or not someone specifically notices it or not, the overall game is enhanced by it.
However, if the animation is bad it actively detracts from the game. Your average gamer may not realize "Why" but something feels off about the game. They may never attribute it specifically to the animation but it could be what is bothering them about the game.
Essentially good animation won't necessarily be noticed for what it is, but your average viewer will find the images pleasing. It is like a good musical score, you won't necessarily notice the music in the background, but subconsciously it is adding to the entire experience.
Delphin Twitch Stream:
But now, 7 years later I still see many games that can't even replicate that level of detail on the animation. It's a shame, really.
Please watch this. Please watch all of it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKIkw3LIoQ
Do you propose they put a mocap suit on a bear to get the realest real bear animations? Animation does not have to be completely grounded in reality to look good. In fact, there would be a dearth of creativity if an animators only goal was to copy real life. A designed, unrealistic movement will look better than a straight mocaped movement. Depending on the talent of the animator of course.
But really, the reason why game animation is lower quality is that most talented animators are not aspiring to become a videogame animator. They're trying to break into the movie industry. Therefore, whats leftover for the videogame industry are the B-tier animators, and they don't have any real pressure to improve their technique because the players and higher-ups are fine with the level of animation so far. Which is unfortunate. Stuff like The Last Guardian or the Naruto PS3 games shows what good animation can do for interactive media.
This is how you do it right:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkb0r2-vYK0
Nintendo Network ID: unclesporky
This so very much. I remember thinking to myself while playing through HL2 back in 2005 (it was 2005 right?) 'This is it. Now everyone else has to step their game up.' But, sadly, it hasn't happened like that.
It has to be grounded in reality, like I said.
Grounded in reality =/= copying real life
see: Sporky's comment, and exactly what I had in mind when I thought of traditional animation. rooted in real life.
and Operation Flashpoint: Red River code to trade/sell
and Halo: Reach code
and Portal 2 code
Yup. They're basing it on reality and studying real lions but it's still the artists interpretation of a lion. And holy shit, that kid from Home Improvement was Simba?!
Oh ok. I misinterpreted your post as a "mocap all the way!" type of post.
Did anyone else think the animator talking about JTT near the beginning got a little creepy?
- Shadow of the Colossus
From now on, all horses in other games are hilarious. Agro is beautifully animated, and so is all of the procedural animations on Wander, without using fancy euphoria physics.
- Source engine
Facial animation is auto-generated lip-syncing with the speech audio file.
And of course, Euphoria.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RHtMM1gTyY
Source engine facial expressions are amazing. Seriously. Being able to tell how the characters in either L4Ds are feeling just by looking at their faces never gets old for me - it's brilliant.
While we're on the topic of the Source engine, and since Portal 2 is (hopefully understandably) on my mind: not a person, but the expressiveness of Wheatley, a character that is pretty much just a robotic eye, blows me away. It's similar to WALL-E - a non-humanoid character that displays emotion/expressions really effectively.
I've only played GTA IV and The Ballad of Gay Tony, so I'm not sure if it's different elsewhere, but Euphoria leads to some pretty silly things under certain circumstances. It's great for the most part, but when someone ragdolls while grabbing onto a car and their limbs bend in a way that would be impossible without them having spontaneously broken every bone... Eh.
Quite a few things lead to things like that, actually. Shooting someone who's was aiming a pistol comes to mind - the hand with the gun bends awkwardly as they stumble sideways. Explosions cause non-stop cartwheeling at insane speeds. These might be more of the physics engine than Euphoria itself, though.
Still, I just played a little of San Andreas again yesterday, and GTA IV's characters/civilians move around an order of magnitude more realistically. I guess what I'm trying to say is Euphoria is great but iffy at the same time
(GTA IV and it's DLC seems to have an odd segregation between the quality of character expressions in a cutscene and in the playable world, too. Facial expressions and the way characters shift around are noticeably much more realistic when it's in a proper cutscene (for instance, at the very beginning of missions) as compared to when the cutscene is "in the world" (e.g. if you did a mission with another character, the bit at the end where they exchange a few lines about how it went). When it's a proper cutscene you get facial animations, natural movement, the works, but when it's "in world" suddenly their faces go blank with only their mouths flopping open and close when they speak, and they stand there waving their arms for expression.)