Game Industry Animation Tools

bethadillon

Hey all. I recently went to the Vancouver International Game Summit, where they had folks from EA, BioWare, and Naughty Dog talking about the animation toolkits they've set up at their companies. Thought it may be helpful for people to see what they're up to on a technical level. Interestingly, all of the people who presented generally had an attitude that there's really no single answer to animation in games, but many solutions that need to be chosen based on the company and the game being made. All of them share a lot of the same principles but do work differently, since their games are all so different.

Naughty Dog’s Animating Character System
BioWare’s Animation Conversation System
Electronic Arts Animation Toolkit

- Beth

Eric Chadwick

Thanks for the links. Unfortunately there's not much actual tech info in the articles. I would have loved to see some screenshots or vids of the tools in action, or at least some flow charts, tech-doc-type items.

Simply mentioning locomotion constraints and blend trees doesn't really give me much of an insight into how their systems solve game animation issues.

I guess the conference didn't want you to publish any slides or diagrams from the presentations? Do you know if any papers will be available at some point?

Mark Dygert

Thanks for writing those up, they where interesting reads

I suspect the light on technical details is due to the companies being vague?
At the last Autodesk seminar a guy from High Moon gave a talk and was VERY vague about everything. I think they are cagey because they don't want to give anything away that gives them a leg up?

Tumerboy

Ya, most places don't want to give away their "secrets"

pbfffttt . . .

:::shameless plug:::

We give away our rig for free, though it's admittedly simplified a bit, but it's pretty much exactly what we use here, minus the facial animation stuff.

http://www.crypticar.com/

bethadillon

Yeah most of the content there is quoted, or rather, I was trying to write notes as fast as possible. They definitely didn't go in-depth other than "this is how we do it." Some speakers DID have some screenshots of animation trees, but in very small font. I can try to get in touch with the speakers and see how much visual content they can share! But yeah, chances are they won't want to break it down enough that it'd go beyond the conceptual level.

Eric Chadwick

I hear you.

Depends on the studio though, some actively encourage whitepapers and the like, Maxis for example.
http://chrishecker.com/Real-time_Motion_Retargeting_to_Highly_Varied_User-Created_Morphologies

There's a lot to be said for sharing tech ideas... advancing the state of the art, getting feedback from other devs, building relationships with the community, indirectly marketing your company for recruitment, etc.

bethadillon

From what I can tell, in some companies, it's revolutionary enough for them to share their tech within the company across teams working on different games, let alone to the public! I think it's more a matter of organization issues than secret-keeping though.

- Beth

Eric Chadwick

I think it's both. :poly104:

There's an editorial in this month's Game Developer about this issue, Brandon Sheffield relates developer tech publication to the aims of Gamasutra and GDMag themselves. He mentioned Insomniac Games' Nocturnal Initiative. It's all code-related (no pretty pics) but it's a great example of sharing tech.

Game editor wikis are another good example, ala Splash Damage, Valve, id, etc.