Discussion: Game Animation
mod
Hi Guys,
Mass Effect has been making the rounds online because of its animation so I thought I'd start a discussion on game animation in general.
http://www.vg247.com/2017/03/16/mass-effect-andromedas-animations-have-already-reduced-it-to-a-laughing-stock/
I assume the Mass Effect situation was more a combination of time, project scale, team size and/or possibly the tech they used for certain animations, and less about the skills of the animators.
- What do you think about the animation in Mass Effect?
- Can you think of other games that had similar problems?
- Which games do you think have especially good animations and why?
- Does it affect the game experience for you in any way?
LETS DISCUSS!
Mass Effect has been making the rounds online because of its animation so I thought I'd start a discussion on game animation in general.
http://www.vg247.com/2017/03/16/mass-effect-andromedas-animations-have-already-reduced-it-to-a-laughing-stock/
I assume the Mass Effect situation was more a combination of time, project scale, team size and/or possibly the tech they used for certain animations, and less about the skills of the animators.
- What do you think about the animation in Mass Effect?
- Can you think of other games that had similar problems?
- Which games do you think have especially good animations and why?
- Does it affect the game experience for you in any way?
LETS DISCUSS!
Replies
I remember UFC 2 having some hilarious animation bugs.
On the games with good animation front It is a toss up between The Last of Us, or God of War (any of them). From an animation stand point The Last of Us is just so... fluid, I know it is majority motion captured but the added tweaks that they add, the cloth physics, secondary action on the hair it just all comes together to make a visually pleasing game in motion.
God of War I am amazed at how readable every single attack, swing, punch and dismember is. God of War 3 especially the way they use animation to really sell such grand scale bosses just astounds me. Once it all comes together with effects, sounds and some flashy camera angles it feels like every battle is an epic tug of war.
The issues I saw seem more like technical problems, rather than animators making mistakes. Pretty poor! Going to guess it was due to time constraints rather than bad artists/leads. No artist would want to push out these issues as final
Best game animations? Overwatch for sure - a tier above anything else. For 2D animation I loved the look of dustforce and its animations were perfectly done. Here's a small preview if you haven't seen the game before
Bad facial animation doesn't really bother me, as long as the voice actor is good. If you have bad facial anim and bad voice actor then makes it hard to care about what they're saying. Gameplay is definitely more important to me though!
@_adamturnbull thanks for starting the discussion
I was talking about this with people at work today. I think this does not reflect on the animators there at all.
I think, and this is just me speculating, the locomotion errors are because they didn't have time to refine it tech-wise, the gif you posted looks like they wanted procedural stride scaling for npc actions / and context sensitive pose layering (like the player getting stuck in the "stair walking" pose)?
I am also thinking that this is the second game they worked in Frostbite, right? Inquisition was the first? So maybe they didn't get the chance to do proper R&D for writing new animation code?
The facial animation is a similar situation I think, there so much dialogue in mass effect games and one way to try and solve it by creating a procedural base and then refine it for cutscenes. Also it might be that a proper facial animation pipeline was seen as "not necessary" by the people setting the budget. Big mistake if that was the case, in my humble opinion. Additionally, if the voice acting was at least dramatic and well done, maybe one could tolerate no facial animation, but both in one, will kill any immersion. At least for me.
Also I don't get why in the world they have these long awkward pauses in the dialogue. Many games suffer from that, Witcher 3 too in many cases, but here it seems like the pauses are even longer than usual. I feel sorry for the devs involved with this game, because I know that bioware has really talented people working there, I can't help but think that this was a (bad) management choice..? But I don't know.
A good example for really immersive animations is Last of Us in my opinion, but making an open world game, with many choices and consequences is an entirely different beast. It is a very difficult choice to make, with many pitfalls, when you need to draw a line between hand-crafted, polished animations and an underlying system that provides a foundation to take workload off of people's shoulders. For example, the classic procedural lip-sync things. You cannot possibly have perfectly hand-crafted (or edited, if captured) lipsync for a game that has hundreds and hundreds of hours of audio recordings spoken with different emotions by hundreds and hundreds of different NPCs. When you have a linear game, you have other problems, but usually you have a more concentrated story, with fewer cuscenes that you can polish to astonishing levels.
Note: I used to work at Bioware. I haven't been there in over 2 years. I do NOT speak for the company in any way. These are just my personal thoughts and assumptions based on my time there.
So, I've seen a ton of clips from ME:A showing the bad animation, and I can honestly say that very little of it looks like it's the animators. The facial animation seems to suffer because of the procedural system they're using. Given that it's worse than previous games. My assumption is that they tried a new system, or a new pipeline that just didn't work out in the end. Lack of time, most likely. Definitely a tech issue, though. In my experience, if you're using a fully procedural lip sync system, animators can do some minor stuff to the upper face, but not the lower half, because it fucks with the lip sync. Some systems are a bit more hands on, absolutely. Not all.
This clip has been going around. https://video.twimg.com/tweet_video/C7B2DIQWsAAR-K-.mp4 This looks like a choice. Not procedural. Those conversations, at least, on DAI, were set up by cinematic designers. They would go through the library of animations and apply them. Basically playing lego with animations. They found what worked for what they needed and used it. My guess is someone used that animation as a place holder until they found something better. If it was a low priority conversation, chances are they got pulled over to another conversation, and never had time to go back and fix it. I think we've all been there before.
You also have to remember this is not just a new iteration of the game. This is the first Mass Effect game using Frostbite. It's essentially starting the game from scratch. I'm betting time played a huge factor in it. I can honestly say that the people there care very much about their games, and I truly hope people don't see all these memes going around and start assuming they don't. They do. Sometimes you aim to knock it out of the park, and it falls short of the fence. If you can look past the memes, and the poor facial animation, it's actually reviewing pretty well. I'd say it's similar to that of Horizon Zero Dawn. The facial was less than stellar, but the gameplay shined through.
Does bad animation ruin the experience for me? It certainly can, but not always. Horizon Zero Dawn is the game I'm currently playing, so it's easiest to tlak about it. The facial animation is... rough to look at. Any time I get into a conversation, I cringe a little. One thing I noticed that helped was turning on the closed captions. haha. Because I was focused on reading, I wasn't looking at the facial. But, the rest of the animation in the game is fantastic, and that's where I spend most of the time anyways. The robot dinosaurs are amazing, and have some great anim sets. Traversal through the world is fantastic. The story is great. So for me, there is enough good in the game to overshadow the bad. Also, the bad facial stands out so much because the rest of the visuals are so bloody good.
Bethesda games tend to get a lot of flack for their animation systems. they aren't anything special if you compare them to Naught Dog games, but the rest of the game is so good that no one cares. People may make fun of the anims, but they certainly aren't focusing a TON of articles on them.
As an animator, I want to believe we're the most important part of a game, but that just isn't true. We're just part of the big picture. We can certainly play a huge part of making a game feel like real life. We can certainly help immerse players in the world they are playing. However, When it comes down to it, game play is king. Hell, look at minecraft. Super popular, minimal animation.
Just my 2 cents.
One thing I did notice is the quality seems consistent with a single character, but varies wildly character to character. The blue alien girl above seems to be consistently better than say the pathfinder girl... or any the other characters. So maybe, in part, it had something to do with who got assigned to do the facial animations?
Games that have great animation- Skullgirls. I'm always impressed by hand drawn animation and readability is important in fighting games.
People come to games for different reasons. I understand that poor or odd animations can take you out of the experience, but it's just a game. When glitches happen it can lead to some of my favorite moments in games (as long as they aren't game breaking).
But should be very easy to fix and I'm sure this should come in the next patch.
Though this could mean some things might not have been properly qa tested...
And dunno what to say for the facial expressions ...
were in 2017
Edit: Another article! http://www.animstate.com/round-table-mass-effect-andromeda/
http://www.animstate.com/round-table-mass-effect-andromeda/
I feel like he says a lot of the stuff I was trying to say, but in a much better way, with public examples. Glad to see him weigh in!