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Animate your characters like real people if you want real people to care about them.
Deusfaux
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Just finished playing the Enslaved demo on a whim, last night and
WOW
what a breath of fresh air it was;
if for nothing else than all the obvious and rewarding work done for the characters in terms of voice acting, and motion capture, and animation, and writing. (if you don't know, they used extensive motion capture work, including all over the face, with Andy Serkis (Gollum, King Kong) as the main character, for all the in-game cutscenes)
I have been saying it for years, but the #1 thing that pulls me, and for sure every non-gamer out of a game, is poor animation. And the industry has been plagued by it since the inception. It's been so bent over backwards with its head shoved up its ass, pissing it's pants with glee to spend more and more money on better water effects, or light bloom, or detailed environments, that it leaves the most important elements to making anything believable, on the floor of the first project meeting.
Why is it that rotoscoped games like Prince of Perisa or Out of This World (Another World) have better animation and fluidity than Fallout New Vegas, a multimillion dollar game that came out this past fall?
Is it because, perhaps, that the movements were based on a REAL person, and not created by some cartoon animation grad, deciding in a vacuum on their computer what gesture appropriately matches line #64?
Enslaved may have all sorts of problems I'm not aware of, but it totally grabs my attention for having characters act in a way that is so much closer to HUMAN, that nearly all games I've played before it.
And what game makers don't get is that whilst animation if of utmost importance, how real the characters LOOK, is not!
You would sooner believe and buy into a cartoon-y, or stylized, or pixelated or blocky or non detailed character that animates superbly, than a photo-realistic one that shuffles and shakes like a robot with a broom up it's ass.
Not ALL games need what I'm describing. Minecraft is excellent the way it is, for example.
But if you start using characters based on real people doing real things, make it look REAL.
You can't have one dude spout off a bunch of lines in a booth, and 3 months later have some other dude they've never met, try and make a character move like they're really saying those lines.
This isn't Saturday morning anymore, people. Get your fucking shit together and animate!
WOW
what a breath of fresh air it was;
if for nothing else than all the obvious and rewarding work done for the characters in terms of voice acting, and motion capture, and animation, and writing. (if you don't know, they used extensive motion capture work, including all over the face, with Andy Serkis (Gollum, King Kong) as the main character, for all the in-game cutscenes)
I have been saying it for years, but the #1 thing that pulls me, and for sure every non-gamer out of a game, is poor animation. And the industry has been plagued by it since the inception. It's been so bent over backwards with its head shoved up its ass, pissing it's pants with glee to spend more and more money on better water effects, or light bloom, or detailed environments, that it leaves the most important elements to making anything believable, on the floor of the first project meeting.
Why is it that rotoscoped games like Prince of Perisa or Out of This World (Another World) have better animation and fluidity than Fallout New Vegas, a multimillion dollar game that came out this past fall?
Is it because, perhaps, that the movements were based on a REAL person, and not created by some cartoon animation grad, deciding in a vacuum on their computer what gesture appropriately matches line #64?
Enslaved may have all sorts of problems I'm not aware of, but it totally grabs my attention for having characters act in a way that is so much closer to HUMAN, that nearly all games I've played before it.
And what game makers don't get is that whilst animation if of utmost importance, how real the characters LOOK, is not!
You would sooner believe and buy into a cartoon-y, or stylized, or pixelated or blocky or non detailed character that animates superbly, than a photo-realistic one that shuffles and shakes like a robot with a broom up it's ass.
Not ALL games need what I'm describing. Minecraft is excellent the way it is, for example.
But if you start using characters based on real people doing real things, make it look REAL.
You can't have one dude spout off a bunch of lines in a booth, and 3 months later have some other dude they've never met, try and make a character move like they're really saying those lines.
This isn't Saturday morning anymore, people. Get your fucking shit together and animate!
Deusfaux on
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a compilation of clips, as many as possible, each of a different video game,
showing every known instance of.... this fucking retarded gesture that every shitty animator uses (which is most of them):
When a character is speaking,
they have one arm at about a 45 degree angle down and to the side, a bit out from the body, palm facing up, their hand in a closed loose fist,
and on the speech, they move the arm a bit down, flex the hand and fingers open, and the arm moves back to it's original position and the hand (ususally) closes again.
DO YOU KNOW WHAT IM TALKING ABOUT?!
OMG it's in far too many games, it's meaningless movement that doesn't represent or reflect anything from real life.
It's like THE industry standard "this character is speaking animation".
So absolutely god awful.
The video would get a ton of hits, especially if set to funny music. All these game makers would be shamed out of ever using it again, and maybe the industry as a whole would consider how terrible, as a whole, their animation has been for way too long.
I'd say just as important in watching like, the first cutscene, was that you had actors acting. Mocap won't help you for shit if you're not using good actors, or the director gets in the way of being natural, because they have pre-conceived notions of what movements they want you to make so they can record them.
How many companies mocap cutscenes anyways? Or faces?
And looking at the playing field now, we're not anywhere near human to human levels of empathy - certainly not from being too indistinguishable from humanlike appearance and motion, which your hypothesis describes
I got the impression from when I watched a trailer that it felt really gimmicky, and it was like their bullet point feature to put on the back cover
"realistic face animations!"
I mean, isn't the supposed gameplay's core all about watching those animations and making judgements about whether the character is lying or not?
It just doesn't sound like a game design that allows for natural human emotions and accompanying movements and gestures.
It SOUNDS like a game of black or white, with the face clearly falling in one of the other, and player effectively hitting a buzzer to call it.
And what about the rest of the character? Is the body held to a high degree of animation too? Was the facial stuff done in a vacuum or acting against another REAL person? Same actors for voicework AND face stuff? All of that is huge.
Also, it's not just a yes/no is this character lying during the interviews. You see how they are reacting and you have to pick between a few different options to continue the conversation.
Also (2), is there a major game studio that doesn't use mo-cap?
(except Ninja Theory, and maybe 1 or 2 others, apparently)
This is 100% because you expect it to look like a game and all the games you've played, and it delivers.
Ask a non-gamer, or just watch their reaction to stuff like Gamebryo engine delivers and it's exceedingly clear, the humans are a far cry from humanlike.
Those games get such a bad rap because the animation hasn't improved in years, and holds back how progressive everything else is. Contemporary games look a good deal better than them, even if they themselves have a long way to go.
There's never been any expectation for superb graphics or animation in the Fallout games.
NW was done via the FO3 engine, so there was even less expectation.
Prince of Persia and Another World were also significantly smaller games.
That said, people still cared about Fallout NW characters, even with it's supposedly inferior animation.
People may have lower standards for character empathy than you, so you might not see much rapid changes in game animation.
I'm sure that there will be talented people who feel as you do, and will make games that feature human character realism.
Just try not to be too upset if others don't share your enthusiasm.
Lens flare only does so much.
This is a joke, right? It's a AAA, multi million dollar costing game, and you're claiming nobody has the expectation of good graphics or animation?
Where do you think the money is going? Why DOES the game have/had for its time good graphics?
I'm sorry, but that's exactly the kind of rotten attitude that has kept development in this area stagnant for years.
The expectation is there for each and every game ever made. The animation has to suit the style and match the level of quality of everything else, if not exceed it.
Actually I think it's because I don't care about animation that much. I don't really care how the characters move or look or act or whatever.
though I'm not sure it entirely succeeds/another conversation another day/etc
but at least it's going places we need to go.
I'm just really glad Enslaved went there too.
More and more and more, please.
Ghost Trick
They leave a deeper impression on you, I think, when animated well.
* I think games with lo-fi graphics can also "get away" with lo-fi animation. But high fidelity graphics commands that the animation also be up to par. Or you might as well have made a slideshow, instead.
I was also thinking hey maybe they can at least do animals decently half the time, but then I thought about it for a minute and remembered that's not true either. Usually it is, again, someone's IDEA of how a spider or bear or bat moves, instead of anything grounded in reality. Or worse, just the animator's memories of how evil scorpions moved in some other game they played before.
But there are other games that just rely on writing to make characters believable and it has worked.
obviously the use of animation and to what degree and what to get out of it constitutes a series of choices.
the problem is that taken as a whole, developers' choice has been "no", and that needs to change, because done well it is far more powerful than all the shaders and realistic shadows could ever be
Crysis 1 had some amazing facial animation too, they moved in the right way and had I believe 48 points that could be moved squashed and stretched.
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namely, running, gunning, and being pissed off
I'm exaggerating, but I hope the point is made. There's not often a lot for the characters to do, or be emotional about, or have a conversation other than "WHERE IS THE DROPSHIP?!"
I mimicked based on your description and realized exactly what you're talking about. I'm pretty sure basically every race in WoW uses that as their talking animation.
Grand Theft Auto 4 also had okayish facial animation (not the best) but the rest was amazing. People walking around the streets, answering their phones while they walk, interacting with the environment and such. I recall before I lightly nudged into a guy with a car and he put his hand out onto the car to regain balance. This on-the fly calculation is pretty amazing.
Oh god also Assassin's Creed 1, 2 and Bro. Fight animations are wonderful and so is traversing, but there are moments where it feels like there is this very slight uneasy pause between a few transitions.
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It's hardly rotten. Some people don't care about graphics or realism. The expectation literally wasn't there for NW. This is evident in New Vegas using the same engine as it's predecessor. Fallout 3 wasn't known for having the cutting edge animation of it's time either. It also used an older graphics engine.
It's a AAA game because of the money spent creating the world, new physics, and new mechanics for hundreds of NPCs to seamlessly utilize. There isn't much of an animation jump between 1, 2, or tactics either. As far as Fallout character animation goes, yesteryear's is just fine.
My point is that Fallout has never been about character animation & people have still loved the hell out of it. Why should they have prioritized it, over what was successful and profitable?
This whole plague bit is silly and hyperbolic.
It's like telling an established and beloved author, on how you dislike the style he was known for.
He isn't a crummy author for not catering a book to your tastes.
Besides, making a new world, physics, or mechanics doesn't mean they can't touch up an animation that they have recycled since infinity. If they can make new animations for unmade before enemies such as a Deathclaw, they could at least fix the walking animations for Humans.
I was discussing Fallout NW, which people felt was excellent, regardless of it's older animation style, and being developed by older designers.
Dude should have picked something that actually sold itself on cutting edge realism, but failed to deliver, than a critically acclaimed game running on a updated 4 or 5 year old engine.
Oblivion in 2006 perhaps- I dunno. I remember people really liking it then as well.
At what point do you release your game, and what do you sacrifice development time for, to make the room for more exquisite animation?
It seems rude to me to take a successful product and say that "x" would have been a better way of developing it, and that it would be just as successful.
so from a design perspective having good animations make sense right
no one is saying if a game has bad animation, that it ruins the game. but would i have played oblivion longer if they didn't walk and talk like disturbed, dilapidated marionettes? fuck yes
And while I love Deus Ex, it's one of my favorite games ever, I've always found the animation in that game really jarring, going back to when I played the game at release. The game had other things going for it, obviously, but the Unreal engine was capable of better. I always wondered just how much more immersion could have been achieved if they had the resources to bring that up to the same level as the games mechanics.
It felt a bit painful to go back to Mass Effect 2 after, as decent as they are for computer games conversations are quite stiff and flat in comparison.
I will have to agree with this, Andy did a tremendous job in portraying a character I can feel a connection to. That annoying crow guy, I can't remember and don't care to remember his fucking name always cut the rope on the tight-rope act at the worst of times.
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Limbo too.
Because you don't have to emulate human beings to have appealing animation. I mean, being unshackled from reality is one of the advantages of animation in the first place.
The problem is a lot of games try to emulate humans and fail, landing us in uncanny valley.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDanX-beShQ
I think one of the trivia facts that you get after playing the game awhile stated that at first, the main walk cycle was mocapped, and they were convinced that mocap would work best for the game. Then an animator decided to try his hand at a walk cycle too, and when they showed both to test audiences, everyone invariably preferred the non-mocapped one, saying it looked more natural and realistic. It's the one that ended up in the game.
This is another thing that sets Pixar apart from other animation studios - they do use some mocap (AFAIK), but everything is at least tweaked by hand, if not created from scratch.
In other words, don't hold up extensive mocap as the ultimate solution. More research/time spent on animation in general would be beneficial.
It's super easy to fix, but so many games do this.