One thing I learned from the Sims is that mocap isn't everything.
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.
if you look in the credits of Pixar movies, they all have a short thing at the end saying it was created 100% without motion capture.
Another major problem with mocap is transitions - going from one animation cycle to another.
That's a really awesome part of the Left 4 Dead games - it's not just instant ragdoll and flopping to the ground like a doll with cut strings when an infected reaches zero hit points.
No, they have death animations blended into it all - they're "dead" but take another few stumbling steps before they fall over. Took me a few levels before I learned to spot what was actually "dead" or not, so I could stop wasting ammo on them.
For me most animation in a 3D videogame space seriously lacks weight on the characters, wether that be with them seemingly walking on air with no friction to the ground of feel like they are shifting no weight when the characters jump.
Another major problem with mocap is transitions - going from one animation cycle to another.
That's a really awesome part of the Left 4 Dead games - it's not just instant ragdoll and flopping to the ground like a doll with cut strings when an infected reaches zero hit points.
No, they have death animations blended into it all - they're "dead" but take another few stumbling steps before they fall over. Took me a few levels before I learned to spot what was actually "dead" or not, so I could stop wasting ammo on them.
This is a very good point. Their varied death animations, such as the way they continue to stumble forward due to momentum, does wonders for their transition from active enemy to rag doll. It adds a sense of weight to their model, which helps them feel like they are actually a part of the world they reside in. It's a much more satisfying experience.
Compare it to say a Bethesda game, or any other game where the moment a creature has 0 hit points left it immediately rag dolls and often times the transition is really jarring.
Another major problem with mocap is transitions - going from one animation cycle to another.
That's a really awesome part of the Left 4 Dead games - it's not just instant ragdoll and flopping to the ground like a doll with cut strings when an infected reaches zero hit points.
No, they have death animations blended into it all - they're "dead" but take another few stumbling steps before they fall over. Took me a few levels before I learned to spot what was actually "dead" or not, so I could stop wasting ammo on them.
The problem is while in those animations they don't interact with anything. They're more like phantoms than corpses at that point.
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My "favorite" animation back in the day was the Walk-Turn one. Lots of 3rd-person action games had them (of the top of my head, Resident Evil). You know the one, where the character would animate their walk cycle, stand in place, and turn while walking. Turn turn turn, walk walk walk. They could swivel their whole bodies while jogging at a standstill!
One particular animation I'll always be critical of is mouthflaps. When a character has a piece of spoken dialogue and it looks like they're chewing rocks it takes me out of the moment. But I know it's probably one of the hardest things to nail down, especially if its in-game using the engine.
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I think more games should have liquefication weapons in them. Maybe low-pitch sonic resonators that would break down solid organic matter.
That being said, I'll restate a point made earlier in the thread about animation: it doesn't need to be realistic. I'll agree that games need their characters to be more animated; sometimes it's a design constraint, but with the amount of money thrown at devs in this day and age, it shouldn't be.
I think realism is an easy answer, though, and the tools used to emulate that can be constraining all their own. Rotoscoping's existed for nearly a century, now; it works well for cinema, but it doesn't take into account the number of situations a model in an interactive environment requires. It makes the animation more lifelike, but works against that notion when it comes to interaction.
Designers just need to use the right tools for the right situations more often. Just like any software. I'd say creative engineering is a spot the industry could use a refresher on.
In celebration of the points raised in this thread, I present to you the original Resident Evil; a game known for both its realistic animation and stunningly evocative voice acting:
Another major problem with mocap is transitions - going from one animation cycle to another.
That's a really awesome part of the Left 4 Dead games - it's not just instant ragdoll and flopping to the ground like a doll with cut strings when an infected reaches zero hit points.
No, they have death animations blended into it all - they're "dead" but take another few stumbling steps before they fall over. Took me a few levels before I learned to spot what was actually "dead" or not, so I could stop wasting ammo on them.
I love this
Another thing that bugs me with ragdoll physics is how weightless and frictionless everything seems in some games. People just flop down and slide around for a while
e: part of the reason I keep playing lead and gold is how fucking cool everything feels. The animations are so great looking that it is fun to just run around and watch your dude tumbling like a trained stuntman
Part of the problem is really the skill level of animators in the industry. Theres not that many schools that actually teach good animation and most that do glorify (for good reason) Pixar. Animated movies are the jobs that good animators dream of and lean themselves towards.
It's difficult to teach animation for interactive environments when the technology is advancing so fast, though. Particularly as a lot of the progress is being made not by animators themselves, but by people building those new technologies.
It's difficult to teach animation for interactive environments when the technology is advancing so fast, though. Particularly as a lot of the progress is being made not by animators themselves, but by people building those new technologies.
It isn't true there are many techniques introduced to help make animation of characters more believable in the world it is set wether that be in film or interactive medium, technology only assists. The problem as already mentioned is that besides a game that makes you want to care for a character or try and be as realistic as possible, then most companies don't have the money and time to invest in a section that won't make that much of a difference, and to keep costs down is essential these days.
Tell you what animation I liked of recent is the fight night series.
Mocapping really bothers me sometimes, when developers don't pay attention to transitioning and every individual animation appears canned. Or as is the case with several space marine games, normal mocap looks really weird on huge-ass, bulky character models. I definitely think there's an art to animating without relying on mocap, but then you have games like Uncharted, which go all the way and are that much better for it.
Sometimes, animation can be a little too real, though.
Developers are catching up with this nowadays. Games like Uncharted 2, Assassin's Creed and Arkham Asylum are raising the bar pretty fast.
But there's no doubt that animation got left behind in the race for photorealism. The difference between the quality of the graphics and the quality of the animation is enormous in many games. It's often the most impoverished area of game visuals, and it really started to stick out like a sore thumb this generation.
I reckon one of the causes is the classic importance of screenshots in selling games.
An epic screenshot can sell a game - so why shouldn't we put all our resources into making these screenshots look good? We can tack on some motion afterwards.
And another problem is the cross-disciplinary nature of making animations for realtime usage. Animation involves acting and performance – "art" disciplines - but it also requires physics.
In other words, getting an animator to make a couple of canned, generic, one-size-fits-all animations won't result in convincing movement in the game. There needs to be subtle interactions between the character and the terrain. And that requires programming.
Unfortunately, animators and coders speak a different language most of the time.
full disclosure- I've been working as an animator in games for just over a year. So I guess that makes me one of the low-skilled animators who are part of the problem at the moment.
Luckily, I haven't been working on any games which require convincing humans or drama. I haven't ruined your Fallouts. (Not yet anyway.)
At the moment I'm really looking forward to seeing Max Payne 3- I've heard it's the evolution of what Rockstar has been doing with Euphoria in RDR and GTAIV, so it's probably going to look awesome. LA Noire looks really great too, obviously.
Tig on
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Werewolf2000adSuckers, I know exactly what went wrong.Registered Userregular
Tig hit a good point with the fact that these animations are going to be playing in so many random places that it can be tough to make anything that will look good everywhere
Uncharted 2 used IK to make sure Drake's (I think that it was too resource intensive to do it for every single dude in the game) feet were always planted on the ground and wouldn't "skate" around as he moved.
They also said they started programming the movement by using a box as their character model but then stopped doing that because it made no sense. Movement that felt good and responsive for a box didn't feel the same way when they actually had an animated character there
"developers" = those companies/coroporations/design teams/publishers/developers/individuals who make the games.
not necessarily the individuals in the animation dept.
And yes, as a general observance, they are idiots, if they think it's okay to keep shovelling us animation slop in 2011, whilst on the other hand telling us how amazing their blur effects are.
to the above: well what about scripted sequences like cutscenes then, what's the excuse for shitty animation there?
When I referred to Enslaved, I wasn't even really thinking of the gameplay animations, come to think of it - apart from the slow-mo moments where you can see his expression and hear his voice - again, quality.
Personally I'd rather games like New Vegas focused on writing and world building than animation, if given the choice between one and the other.
One bit of technology I thought would have been more used by now is Euphoria. It's the thing that basically makes bodies behave like physics objects, so in a way it bypasses "animation" altogether. They made a football game called "backbreaker" using that engine, in which none of the tackles has pre-canned animations but were made using collision data. IMO tech like that has a ton of potential and could be the long-term replacement for animation as we think of it right now.
On another note, I read somewhere that Bethesda used some kind of middleware service for some of their animations - don't know the details but a company basically has a library of common motions they can license to developers. This might be a good idea for getting better animations more cheaply - instead of each studio reinventing the wheel for their walk/run/climb/etc.... animations they can use premade ones. A similar development probably improved physics behavior in games - Havok physics is in damn near every game that has physics, because it's probably more cost-effective to use it than to develop something equivalent in-house. We might see the same thing happen with animation in the future.
Valve deserves the praise in this thread. It's not just about being "realistic" but also serving a purpose in the gameplay. There is an exhaustive amount of material written on TF2's function-driven artwork (well, before the hatpocalypse struck). I don't think the Heavy could exist as a real human being, but he and the other characters are well-animated*.
After hearing what this thread had to say about Enslaved, I bought it new for $20. Not disappointed. Very well done.
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I'm not a traditional artist/animator, but I'm sure there's a bunch of lessons about how even the most exaggerated movements are still rooted in reality - ie, something a real person really does/can do.
bad animation is rooted in nothing, it floats it a vacuum
At it's heart, I think the hand thing is a partial shrug, as well as a slightly defensive posture - look at me, my hand's open, I'm unarmed. You do it when you say things like "look, it's not my fault that such and such happened." Of course animators that use it don't often take that into account and just use it as shorthand for "I'm talking."
moreso than that, it lacks all the subtle qualities a movement a person might actually do in coversation. it's just a vague generalized idea of a gesture, rather than a real one a real human does
I'm not a traditional artist/animator, but I'm sure there's a bunch of lessons about how even the most exaggerated movements are still rooted in reality - ie, something a real person really does/can do.
bad animation is rooted in nothing, it floats it a vacuum
You are right, its the first major lesson you learn is to properly use spacing and judgement of weight to the movement of the animation. Something like a ball bouncing can be exaggerated by being stretched to show speed and impact but still has to move like a real ball would physically so the viewer knows its a ball bouncing.
From some of the videos shown (especially the mo cap on clock tower 3) the animation has more to do with how Japanese move and act for the camera. Its very common when watching some japanese movies to see this sort of stereotypical movement/behaviour. Not to say its only the Japanese that have unusual acting movements, lots of American and British films have some very strange ways of walking/running that is deemed 'realistic for film'.
Ziggymon on
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
edited April 2011
Just wanted to voice my approval of this thread. I have very neurotic preferences and ticks when it comes to games, and animation simply is not getting the attention and care it deserves in most cases.
Also want to note approval regarding Enslaved, and actually voice some apologies to Ninja Theory. Their track record has not been entirely stellar, but they really poured a lot of heart into this game. I downloaded the PS3 demo just because I could, and, well, wow. I'm not so big on the combat, but a game is rarely about smashing robots and that's not the core feature here anyway. Simply beautiful work. Now I just need to find the full game somewhere.
Apparently they hired Andy Serkis for much of the mocap involved.
You know what game had good single player animation but noone noticed? codblops. They made a big thing about mocapping all the actors in the scenes, and even recording their faces very carefully, and no one cared. The problem with good animation is that it can often go unnoticed for so much effort.
Same with crysis 1 and 2. It just fitted in, and noone noticed.
You know what is REALLY awful? That one walking away animation characters end conversations with in mass effect, both of them!
THANK YOU!
*awkwardly turns head away then steps off camera*
I just started Mass Effect 2 for the third time this weekend and what's weird is so many awesome animations are in that game. The way they frame the scene during conversations, the poses and the way they get in there, really good stuff. Then there's that exit stage right that is laughably bad. I almost feel they left that in there because it's such a cliche Mass Effect thing.
I dunno. But besides that, and some awkward facial animations that don't work for some characters (my Shepeard can't close her eyes, her eye lids go behind her eyeballs), that game is aces in the animations department.
And Enslaved is a fantastic animation / character experience. You really feel for Monkey and Trip and their predicament. The rest of the game was average, but the animation and voice acting were top notch!
Posts
if you look in the credits of Pixar movies, they all have a short thing at the end saying it was created 100% without motion capture.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
That's a really awesome part of the Left 4 Dead games - it's not just instant ragdoll and flopping to the ground like a doll with cut strings when an infected reaches zero hit points.
No, they have death animations blended into it all - they're "dead" but take another few stumbling steps before they fall over. Took me a few levels before I learned to spot what was actually "dead" or not, so I could stop wasting ammo on them.
*arm wave motion*
*tilts head to side, point arm out*
"LOOK!! Over.. THERE!!"
This is a very good point. Their varied death animations, such as the way they continue to stumble forward due to momentum, does wonders for their transition from active enemy to rag doll. It adds a sense of weight to their model, which helps them feel like they are actually a part of the world they reside in. It's a much more satisfying experience.
Compare it to say a Bethesda game, or any other game where the moment a creature has 0 hit points left it immediately rag dolls and often times the transition is really jarring.
The problem is while in those animations they don't interact with anything. They're more like phantoms than corpses at that point.
One particular animation I'll always be critical of is mouthflaps. When a character has a piece of spoken dialogue and it looks like they're chewing rocks it takes me out of the moment. But I know it's probably one of the hardest things to nail down, especially if its in-game using the engine.
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I think more games should have liquefication weapons in them. Maybe low-pitch sonic resonators that would break down solid organic matter.
That being said, I'll restate a point made earlier in the thread about animation: it doesn't need to be realistic. I'll agree that games need their characters to be more animated; sometimes it's a design constraint, but with the amount of money thrown at devs in this day and age, it shouldn't be.
I think realism is an easy answer, though, and the tools used to emulate that can be constraining all their own. Rotoscoping's existed for nearly a century, now; it works well for cinema, but it doesn't take into account the number of situations a model in an interactive environment requires. It makes the animation more lifelike, but works against that notion when it comes to interaction.
Designers just need to use the right tools for the right situations more often. Just like any software. I'd say creative engineering is a spot the industry could use a refresher on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPdJgD4xKSM
"A DINING ROOM!"
I love this
Another thing that bugs me with ragdoll physics is how weightless and frictionless everything seems in some games. People just flop down and slide around for a while
e: part of the reason I keep playing lead and gold is how fucking cool everything feels. The animations are so great looking that it is fun to just run around and watch your dude tumbling like a trained stuntman
stop acting like developers are idiots
they have deadlines and bosses
It isn't true there are many techniques introduced to help make animation of characters more believable in the world it is set wether that be in film or interactive medium, technology only assists. The problem as already mentioned is that besides a game that makes you want to care for a character or try and be as realistic as possible, then most companies don't have the money and time to invest in a section that won't make that much of a difference, and to keep costs down is essential these days.
Tell you what animation I liked of recent is the fight night series.
Sometimes, animation can be a little too real, though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDxi5iG8llA
What the hell game is that?
But there's no doubt that animation got left behind in the race for photorealism. The difference between the quality of the graphics and the quality of the animation is enormous in many games. It's often the most impoverished area of game visuals, and it really started to stick out like a sore thumb this generation.
I reckon one of the causes is the classic importance of screenshots in selling games.
An epic screenshot can sell a game - so why shouldn't we put all our resources into making these screenshots look good? We can tack on some motion afterwards.
And another problem is the cross-disciplinary nature of making animations for realtime usage. Animation involves acting and performance – "art" disciplines - but it also requires physics.
In other words, getting an animator to make a couple of canned, generic, one-size-fits-all animations won't result in convincing movement in the game. There needs to be subtle interactions between the character and the terrain. And that requires programming.
Unfortunately, animators and coders speak a different language most of the time.
full disclosure- I've been working as an animator in games for just over a year. So I guess that makes me one of the low-skilled animators who are part of the problem at the moment.
Luckily, I haven't been working on any games which require convincing humans or drama. I haven't ruined your Fallouts. (Not yet anyway.)
At the moment I'm really looking forward to seeing Max Payne 3- I've heard it's the evolution of what Rockstar has been doing with Euphoria in RDR and GTAIV, so it's probably going to look awesome. LA Noire looks really great too, obviously.
Clock Tower 3. Good old Dennis and his wanker's twitch.
Here's the motion capture session.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAoW-Ovud24
EVERYBODY WANTS TO SIT IN THE BIG CHAIR, MEG!
See, I think the body animation, on a technical level, in that piece, is great.
I can't realyl see their faces or mouths, but it appears to not be on the same level as the body.
HOWEVER, the actual acting and direction of the body movements, is obviously over the top and too extreme.
So, I would suggest that is isn't real enough, if you follow me.
The character's movements are not grounded in reality. The animation is accurate, but the actors were just flailing around like fools.
Uncharted 2 used IK to make sure Drake's (I think that it was too resource intensive to do it for every single dude in the game) feet were always planted on the ground and wouldn't "skate" around as he moved.
They also said they started programming the movement by using a box as their character model but then stopped doing that because it made no sense. Movement that felt good and responsive for a box didn't feel the same way when they actually had an animated character there
"developers" = those companies/coroporations/design teams/publishers/developers/individuals who make the games.
not necessarily the individuals in the animation dept.
And yes, as a general observance, they are idiots, if they think it's okay to keep shovelling us animation slop in 2011, whilst on the other hand telling us how amazing their blur effects are.
to the above: well what about scripted sequences like cutscenes then, what's the excuse for shitty animation there?
When I referred to Enslaved, I wasn't even really thinking of the gameplay animations, come to think of it - apart from the slow-mo moments where you can see his expression and hear his voice - again, quality.
Makes me laugh every time. The quick side step to the left, then exit right!
One bit of technology I thought would have been more used by now is Euphoria. It's the thing that basically makes bodies behave like physics objects, so in a way it bypasses "animation" altogether. They made a football game called "backbreaker" using that engine, in which none of the tackles has pre-canned animations but were made using collision data. IMO tech like that has a ton of potential and could be the long-term replacement for animation as we think of it right now.
On another note, I read somewhere that Bethesda used some kind of middleware service for some of their animations - don't know the details but a company basically has a library of common motions they can license to developers. This might be a good idea for getting better animations more cheaply - instead of each studio reinventing the wheel for their walk/run/climb/etc.... animations they can use premade ones. A similar development probably improved physics behavior in games - Havok physics is in damn near every game that has physics, because it's probably more cost-effective to use it than to develop something equivalent in-house. We might see the same thing happen with animation in the future.
whereas physics is a set of laws, the same across all universes (even if a dev decides to bend or change one, the others remain the same)
animation is going to vary between every living thing.
just a thought.
does everyone know what I'm talking abotu with the open and close hand gesture though?
It's in the first few seconds of Comic Jumper, I last saw it.
FFX is full of it. Any scene not specifically mocapped has a lot of the hand thing. Like 5-6 times in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6usb2D-sSs
I remember Yuna doing it all the time specifically, it was very obvious and bouncy when she did it.
*Besides weird bugs like the crazy legs.
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bad animation is rooted in nothing, it floats it a vacuum
You are right, its the first major lesson you learn is to properly use spacing and judgement of weight to the movement of the animation. Something like a ball bouncing can be exaggerated by being stretched to show speed and impact but still has to move like a real ball would physically so the viewer knows its a ball bouncing.
From some of the videos shown (especially the mo cap on clock tower 3) the animation has more to do with how Japanese move and act for the camera. Its very common when watching some japanese movies to see this sort of stereotypical movement/behaviour. Not to say its only the Japanese that have unusual acting movements, lots of American and British films have some very strange ways of walking/running that is deemed 'realistic for film'.
Also want to note approval regarding Enslaved, and actually voice some apologies to Ninja Theory. Their track record has not been entirely stellar, but they really poured a lot of heart into this game. I downloaded the PS3 demo just because I could, and, well, wow. I'm not so big on the combat, but a game is rarely about smashing robots and that's not the core feature here anyway. Simply beautiful work. Now I just need to find the full game somewhere.
Apparently they hired Andy Serkis for much of the mocap involved.
Same with crysis 1 and 2. It just fitted in, and noone noticed.
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I just started Mass Effect 2 for the third time this weekend and what's weird is so many awesome animations are in that game. The way they frame the scene during conversations, the poses and the way they get in there, really good stuff. Then there's that exit stage right that is laughably bad. I almost feel they left that in there because it's such a cliche Mass Effect thing.
I dunno. But besides that, and some awkward facial animations that don't work for some characters (my Shepeard can't close her eyes, her eye lids go behind her eyeballs), that game is aces in the animations department.
And Enslaved is a fantastic animation / character experience. You really feel for Monkey and Trip and their predicament. The rest of the game was average, but the animation and voice acting were top notch!