How did artists rig/animate PS1 era characters?

JordanN

I've been interested in learning to how rig/pose characters/objects and so I started looking at some PS1 games (because I want to get the simplest idea of how it works).


Compared to today, how much different were the tools/pipeline/effort needed to make moving characters like this? Did they just rely on one skeleton/few bones and hand animate the rest? 

RN

There's some information here, search for the word "bone":
http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/04/making-crash-bandicoot-part-3/

musashidan

I remember messing about with the Gamestudio 5 engine back in the day and it was vertex-based animation.....I spent hours animating the worst walk cycle ever commited to a level.....

But, skeleton hierarchy-wise, the principles are pretty much the same, minus the engine limitations of the day, obviously. Things have, of course, come a long way since PS1 but bone systems were used, albeit with less bones.

PolyHertz

I think a lot of games back then had characters broken into segments so as to use direct parenting instead of weights.

Mark Dygert

Yea all of the FFVII characters where broken up into segments with 100% of the verts in that segment being weighted to the bone, 1:1 weighting. Some "rigs" didn't have bones and where just well placed object pivots linked together to form chains.

I forget if vertex weighting was even possible on the PS1, it might have been toward the end of it's life cycle, which was pretty freakin long. 

Vertex animation for games like quake and crash bandicoot got around the 1:1 segmented problem by not having joints or skeletons but animating every vertex, in game. It gave them fluid deformation and gave Crash a lot of squash and stretch that just wasn't possible at the time. But they didn't animate the verts, they still used skeletons and multi-joint weighting to create the animations, but that was all stripped out on export and what showed up in game was straight vertex animation.

http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/04/making-crash-bandicoot-part-3/

If you keep the models low poly enough it's still pretty efficient for a lot of games.

PostNuker

Different games on PS1 did that differently. I remember Resident Evil 1 and 2 had characters having limbs being separate meshes from the body. So i presume they animated them as separate pieces, probably done procedurally. Some games like MGS had a vertex animation. It's very notable effect, when mesh always kinda warps, it's also very noticeable in Quake 2 on first person weapon models. Quake was famous using vertex animation, opposite to Unreal's bone animation. And there were some animation done with bones.

thomasp

the tools used back then were most likely alias poweranimator (precursor to maya) and softimage 3D. i can't say anything about alias but softimage worked pretty much like what we have today - IK rigs with floating control elements and the option to use blendshapes. vertex weighting to bind models to the rig.