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Procedural Animation

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Makkon polycounter
The programmer for Overgrowth gave a great talk on creating procedural animation, and the way he does it, it's a remarkably simple way of doing it that gives you a huge amount of control.

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020583/Animation-Bootcamp-An-Indie-Approach

I just wanted to share that. Any thoughts on the future of procedural animation in games? I know this was brought up in the E3 thread, and I felt we ought to discuss it more in depth. Any approaches you'd like to see attempted? Any examples of what hasn't been working so well? Got an interesting concept you want to prototype? Let's talk about it!

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  • Pancakes
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    Pancakes polycounter lvl 10
    That man is superior to me in every way.
  • Shadownami92
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    Shadownami92 polycounter lvl 7
    Yeah I've been really interested in it ever since seeing it in Overgrowth. I'd love to see this used to have characters feel more in contact with their environments personally. Being able to see a character walking by a wall and dragging their hand against it or holding their hand out close to it in case they lose balance, or same with holding onto railing when going down stairs.

    Procedural tends to seem to blend well with physics as well so it would be cool to see more impact with attacks and whatnot, if you get hit the stomach hard the body curve around the impact area before going flying.

    basically I want to see it be used to have characters look more connected to their environment.
  • Pancakes
  • Makkon
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    Makkon polycounter
    There's a lot of things that can be done with non-linear interpolation of keyframes, clever constraints, good use of IK systems, and ragdoll behaviors. We really don't need Endorphin or Euphoria for this sort of thing. The great thing is that the systems and methods he talked about are not expensive, nor do they affect the core gameplay experience from canned animations.

    Yeah, I want to see more connection with the environment and other characters too. I think everything he talked about in his video any game programmer could take and refine.

    Pancakes: Yeah, that's a spring interpolation. That's the sort of animation curve he talked about using often.
  • SaboR1996
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    SaboR1996 polycounter lvl 8
    I've been following overgrowth since 185 if I recall and I was seriously blown away by some of the tech, especially the damage system being linked to where you are hit. this game is an underdog that needs to be appreciated more.

    The animations in this game are really something. some developers seriously need to take a leaf out of their book.

    cant wait for more from them!
  • d1ver
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    d1ver polycounter lvl 14
    David is fantastic. Really makes me want to try that technique.
    This is great for independent development. Definitely should be shared more.
  • thatanimator
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    thatanimator polycounter lvl 6
    love that break down <3

    13 frames for all his navigation is madness..
  • MiAlx
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    MiAlx polycounter lvl 10
    This talk was really informative, thanks a lot for sharing Makkon. :)

    It's really interesting to see how the workload was reduced with his procedural techniques and to get a glimpse into the process of an obviously talented developer.

    What I am thinking though, I might be wrong of course, is that in many cases there should be more of a halfway-meeting between code-driven, procedural systems and fully animated motion. While the procedural system does create a more linear workflow, maybe add more responsiveness, reduces the workload and makes everything easier to organize and handle and so on, which is really useful, especially for indie companies, who don't have a huge budget or giant teams, it feels as if too much control could be taken away from the animations if a game relies almost solely on algorithms and constraints for the movement.

    Fully animated performances, can add a lot more to a character than the necessary locomotion and plausibility. It can add a certain and/or unique style, a certain personality to a character for instance. Look at sunset overdrive's amazing animation style for example, I believe a lot of that would be lost in a purely procedural system.

    But I am generalizing here, of course it really depends on what kind of game you want to make, team size, the budget, what kind of style it has etc.
  • Pancakes
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    Pancakes polycounter lvl 10
    To be honest I haven't played many games with impressive animation in them lately. Last one I can think of was Bioshock Infinite. It seems like they mocap a running cycle and that mocap sequence comprises 50% of all the action you'll see in the game. Not counting cutscenes which are basically just mocapped villains pacing back and forward giving you monologue.
  • Blond
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    Blond polycounter lvl 9
    its great really but i think animation overall already looks bad, cheap and not polished in video games. this doesnt help at all...
  • Bruno Afonseca
    Excellent talk, hope this helps a lot of people out there. Very clever approach to it :)
  • Muzzoid
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    Muzzoid polycounter lvl 10
    Blond, could you extrapolate that into a proper argument about how better more dynamic tools are a bad thing?
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    Yeah, I'd much rather see characters that properly interact with the environment, other characters, and feels responsive, than a character that has a lot of personality and character built into their animation. But there's also no reason you can't do both.

    Most 3rd person games don't have great responsive movement, and the characters look like they are drunkenly bumping into things. Elder Scroll games are particularly bad in 3rd person.
  • MiAlx
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    MiAlx polycounter lvl 10
    Pancakes wrote: »
    To be honest I haven't played many games with impressive animation in them lately. It seems like they mocap a running cycle and that mocap sequence comprises 50% of all the action you'll see in the game. Not counting cutscenes which are basically just mocapped villains pacing back and forward giving you monologue.

    That's a bit cynical, you just have to look closer to find some! :D
    Jokes aside, there are multiple different factors influencing how something is animated and then tied into the game. Factors like performance, time, the genre of the game, the very nature of the medium that doesn't let you use movie pipelines, since you don't animate a "scene" but a specific move-set etc.

    But I quickly did some youtubing and IF you are interested, you can check them out. :)
    1) Here's Sunset Overdrives respawn animations, they have personality (and a healthy dose of silliness) that would be lost with "just" procedural animation.

    2) Wildstar has a small but cheeky creature race called "Chua". Take a look at their move-set, how the body and ears first squash when the character jumps and then stretch when the characters starts to fall, the way the body bounces back etc. The style fits the character perfectly imo. That can only be achieved when you have the control I mentioned in my other post.

    3) inFamous: Second Son's combat animations. It has very clearly defined poses and for example the way the character's anticipation (the energy gathering phase) holds for a bit, while the chain unwraps itself due to it's momentum before he really rapidly swings the chain to hit the enemy for the first time (around 2:45), that is a cool way to convey strength and weight for example.

    4) Witcher 2. It has really nicely choreographed combat animations. Sure they are mocaped, but they are still edited and retimed, some parts, I'm guessing, are completely done from scratch, here in some moves they hold the overall motion of the body while the arms continue to move forward etc. That's done make the moves look more powerful.

    5) Batman: Arkham City's combat. Also nicely choreographed, also mocap. But the thing is this, it seems as though mocap is just the base for the motion, they took the mocap data and exaggerated a lot of the motions to give them a more 'comicy' feel to them, while the real world physics rules still apply. Realistic physics rules as a base while still exaggerating specific things for the comicy feel. You can see though that sometimes Batman will hold a bit, for example when he jumps in combat. That is a game design choice to ensure that the player has enough reaction time to continue or start a combo. Or a bigger enemy might have a long anticipation move before he hits, that's, again, to give the player enough time to roll away or counter or whatever.
    This is just my personal opinion of course and I might be wrong, I just feel that often these sort of things are overlooked, when in reality a lot of planning and work goes into them and add a lot the overall gameplay experience. :)
  • MiAlx
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    MiAlx polycounter lvl 10
    ZacD wrote: »
    Yeah, I'd much rather see characters that properly interact with the environment, other characters, and feels responsive, than a character that has a lot of personality and character built into their animation. But there's also no reason you can't do both.

    Most 3rd person games don't have great responsive movement, and the characters look like they are drunkenly bumping into things. Elder Scroll games are particularly bad in 3rd person.

    Yes I agree, I don't like it either when there is no interaction with the environment etc. But that's why I said that ideally these two workflows would meet in the middle. Responsive movement, characters with more awareness of their surroundings but without sacrificing the control over the animations. :)
  • Shadownami92
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    Shadownami92 polycounter lvl 7
    MiAlx wrote: »
    That's a bit cynical, you just have to look closer to find some! :D
    Jokes aside, there are multiple different factors influencing how something is animated and then tied into the game. Factors like performance, time, the genre of the game, the very nature of the medium that doesn't let you use movie pipelines, since you don't animate a "scene" but a specific move-set etc.

    But I quickly did some youtubing and IF you are interested, you can check them out. :)
    1) Here's Sunset Overdrives respawn animations, they have personality (and a healthy dose of silliness) that would be lost with "just" procedural animation.

    2) Wildstar has a small but cheeky creature race called "Chua". Take a look at their move-set, how the body and ears first squash when the character jumps and then stretch when the characters starts to fall, the way the body bounces back etc. The style fits the character perfectly imo. That can only be achieved when you have the control I mentioned in my other post.

    3) inFamous: Second Son's combat animations. It has very clearly defined poses and for example the way the character's anticipation (the energy gathering phase) holds for a bit, while the chain unwraps itself due to it's momentum before he really rapidly swings the chain to hit the enemy for the first time (around 2:45), that is a cool way to convey strength and weight for example.

    4) Witcher 2. It has really nicely choreographed combat animations. Sure they are mocaped, but they are still edited and retimed, some parts, I'm guessing, are completely done from scratch, here in some moves they hold the overall motion of the body while the arms continue to move forward etc. That's done make the moves look more powerful.

    5) Batman: Arkham City's combat. Also nicely choreographed, also mocap. But the thing is this, it seems as though mocap is just the base for the motion, they took the mocap data and exaggerated a lot of the motions to give them a more 'comicy' feel to them, while the real world physics rules still apply. Realistic physics rules as a base while still exaggerating specific things for the comicy feel. You can see though that sometimes Batman will hold a bit, for example when he jumps in combat. That is a game design choice to ensure that the player has enough reaction time to continue or start a combo. Or a bigger enemy might have a long anticipation move before he hits, that's, again, to give the player enough time to roll away or counter or whatever.
    This is just my personal opinion of course and I might be wrong, I just feel that often these sort of things are overlooked, when in reality a lot of planning and work goes into them and add a lot the overall gameplay experience. :)

    I don't really think that anybody hear disagrees that something might be lost from completely procedural animation, but what is nice about the system that David showed was that a lot of the animation in Overgrowth is controlled by keyed poses. So with that you can get a lot of your personality in the characters still while keeping the character quite procedural.

    Not to mention the bounciness of the Chua in Wildstar is pretty straightforward squash and stretch which very well could be implemented into a procedural system. The end squash/bounce of the characters could be a more extreme example of the spring damper system of Overgrowths crouching.

    Procedural animation doesn't mean that characters need to act like robots. Based on the way you go with it you can have characters show more personality and be more dynamic, It's just a matter of setting up your system to account for the types of body language and methods of environmental interaction that are required from characters in your game.

    You can also see where he talks about improving procedural animation for more natural movements and more performance like animations in the Refinement and Ragdoll sections of his talk too. And not just that, You could probably even use the exact same system as Overgrowth but add more frames for variations in the character based on what they are holding, if they got hit in a certain limb and if you only have 13 frames for a character, it could make creating variations for different characters much easier as well.
  • MiAlx
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    MiAlx polycounter lvl 10
    Hmm yeah.. I totally see your point, I didn't think of it that way to be honest.

    Regarding the Chua, I took the jump just as an example, but yeah now that you've said it, if you use the spring damper system on the body and maybe offset the sections (stomach area, upper body, head etc.) you could create procedural overlap for the landing after the jump and by adding drag to appendages like ears and tails, combined with key poses you could get the same effect procedurally.

    I mean, don't get me wrong, I could definitely see the advantages of Dave's workflow, but I got a bit caught up in the idea/worry that code-driven, mathematically approached motion = loss of an artistic touch. But I see now that I missed part of the point and that it depends on how you go at it and that you can expand that workflow, like you said. Thank you for explaining, Shadownami92. :)
  • Makkon
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    Makkon polycounter
    MiAlx, I do think you missed the point. The idea of procedural animation is to take out the repetitive and draining parts of animation, and allow the animator to focus on the performance. Things like secondary animation can be automated, and many character dynamics that place the character in the environment are controlled by keyframes that an animator still works on. We're talking about coming out of the canned animation era, which opens up the doors for more responsive gameplay without sacrificing dynamic character animation. It's a concept that can really put your character in the world, rather than an actor rehearsing on a stage.
  • Justin Meisse
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    Justin Meisse polycounter lvl 19
    I wonder if Blond believes it's the quality of the animators that's the problem, from what I've seen that isn't the case. Plenty of animators come to games from VFX because, surprisingly, it's more stable than the film industry. They don't splash down like superstars showing lowly game animators how it's done, they have to adapt to making animations that must look good from every angle, that are fast enough to not frustrate the player, blend with other animations, and so on....

    If you think game animation is bad and unpolished, only through the intersection of code & animation will it get better.

    ANYWAY I'm absolutely going to steal this technique for my games, I've been really interested in procedural content generation for the last 20 or so years.
  • heboltz3
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    heboltz3 polycounter lvl 9
    Blond wrote: »
    its great really but i think animation overall already looks bad, cheap and not polished in video games. this doesnt help at all...

    Through the talk he made it clear that the system is developing as it goes along. Constant iteration of this system will fuel the look thus raising the quality. (if you believe that the animation is subpar)

    It's also worth mentioning that I believe the majority of these cycles, as he said in the talk, are running from either 3 or 4 frames, maybe even less in some scenarios. Product management triangle comes to mind, and I'd argue that Wolfire is heading in the correct direction. Hats off to the dudes there, this was a really inspiring talk for me as an animator and more importantly, a developer.
  • SaboR1996
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    SaboR1996 polycounter lvl 8
    Glad I watched that, gave some pretty sweet insight in how he did the animation system.
  • easterislandnick
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    easterislandnick polycounter lvl 17
    It's a very interesting system but I'm not convinced the results look that great. The air spin and falls in particular. A lot of what he does is really clever though.
  • Blond
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    Blond polycounter lvl 9
    MiAlx wrote: »
    That's a bit cynical, you just have to look closer to find some! :D
    Jokes aside, there are multiple different factors influencing how something is animated and then tied into the game. Factors like performance, time, the genre of the game, the very nature of the medium that doesn't let you use movie pipelines, since you don't animate a "scene" but a specific move-set etc.

    But I quickly did some youtubing and IF you are interested, you can check them out. :)
    1) Here's Sunset Overdrives respawn animations, they have personality (and a healthy dose of silliness) that would be lost with "just" procedural animation.

    2) Wildstar has a small but cheeky creature race called "Chua". Take a look at their move-set, how the body and ears first squash when the character jumps and then stretch when the characters starts to fall, the way the body bounces back etc. The style fits the character perfectly imo. That can only be achieved when you have the control I mentioned in my other post.

    3) inFamous: Second Son's combat animations. It has very clearly defined poses and for example the way the character's anticipation (the energy gathering phase) holds for a bit, while the chain unwraps itself due to it's momentum before he really rapidly swings the chain to hit the enemy for the first time (around 2:45), that is a cool way to convey strength and weight for example.

    4) Witcher 2. It has really nicely choreographed combat animations. Sure they are mocaped, but they are still edited and retimed, some parts, I'm guessing, are completely done from scratch, here in some moves they hold the overall motion of the body while the arms continue to move forward etc. That's done make the moves look more powerful.

    5) Batman: Arkham City's combat. Also nicely choreographed, also mocap. But the thing is this, it seems as though mocap is just the base for the motion, they took the mocap data and exaggerated a lot of the motions to give them a more 'comicy' feel to them, while the real world physics rules still apply. Realistic physics rules as a base while still exaggerating specific things for the comicy feel. You can see though that sometimes Batman will hold a bit, for example when he jumps in combat. That is a game design choice to ensure that the player has enough reaction time to continue or start a combo. Or a bigger enemy might have a long anticipation move before he hits, that's, again, to give the player enough time to roll away or counter or whatever.
    This is just my personal opinion of course and I might be wrong, I just feel that often these sort of things are overlooked, when in reality a lot of planning and work goes into them and add a lot the overall gameplay experience. :)



    I would do prefer it if more developpers would focus having quality animation like these..:)
  • Blond
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    Blond polycounter lvl 9
    I wonder if Blond believes it's the quality of the animators that's the problem, from what I've seen that isn't the case. Plenty of animators come to games from VFX because, surprisingly, it's more stable than the film industry. They don't splash down like superstars showing lowly game animators how it's done, they have to adapt to making animations that must look good from every angle, that are fast enough to not frustrate the player, blend with other animations, and so on....

    If you think game animation is bad and unpolished, only through the intersection of code & animation will it get better.

    ANYWAY I'm absolutely going to steal this technique for my games, I've been really interested in procedural content generation for the last 20 or so years.


    No I don't have anything against the game animators. It's more about how they're trying to cheapen and cheapen animation cost in video games resulting generally with characters that have soulless automated motions.
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    Sunset Overdrive and Witcher 2 look and feel very clunky during actual gameplay. Functional animation is a lot more important than flashy and expressive.
  • Pancakes
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    Pancakes polycounter lvl 10
    ZacD wrote: »
    Sunset Overdrive and Witcher 2 look and feel very clunky during actual gameplay. Functional animation is a lot more important than flashy and expressive.

    I don't know what Sunset Overdrive is, but Witcher 2's responsiveness is similiar to Dark Souls. It's "clunky" on purpose in order to simulate the weight and follow through of a hero wrestling with inertia.

    Sort of like how the protagists in Castlevania games have the delay before and after each attack in order to simulate the fact that, "hey you're fighting with a whip, man"

    Sometimes it's a relavant design choice to lower responsiveness.

    ANother example would be the survival horror genre, you can't give someone the ability to double jump and parkour when they are supposed to be afraid of the zombies that are inching toward them slowly through the streets. Well maybe you could, cuz that might be sort of awesome, but it might diminish how scary it was if you did that.
  • Mr.Mint
    Hmm, maybe I can throw something in.....from Mr. Perlin.
    [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cNF4b-g8CA&quot;]Autonomous Digital Actors: 1 of 3 (www.actormachine.com) - YouTube[/ame]
  • Muzzoid
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    Muzzoid polycounter lvl 10
    Blond, I don't often say this on forums and instead try and provide a valid argument. But what you just said is ignorant and biased from a skewed world view based upon what you wish was true instead of what actually is true.

    One could easily and correctly make the argument that it's soulless to have animation pre-made that can't possibly take into considerations all the variables that happen in a game world.
  • Pancakes
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    Pancakes polycounter lvl 10
    Muzz, dat avatar just adds so much more oomph to every and anything that you say
  • Noren
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    Noren polycounter lvl 19
    Pancakes wrote: »
    Muzz, dat avatar just adds so much more oomph to every and anything that you say
    Same goes for Blond's avatar, in a way.

    @Blond: Your avatar is done well, insofar as it is very expressive.
    But (and maybe you're fully aware of this): People will read everything you have to say and match it at least subconsciously with this expression in front of them and it doesn't help that both seem to be a perfect match not too seldom.

    As for the topic: I think it's very clever and looks better than I would have expected with that few keyframes, though a quick moving character like the one in the demonstration might lend itself more to this technique than a slower one.
  • Pancakes
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    Pancakes polycounter lvl 10
    I tend to read it as a perpetually frustrated and sarcastic mind blow
  • Muzzoid
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    Muzzoid polycounter lvl 10
    Well it's Tim and Eric, you can only take it so seriously! Perhaps i should replace eric with celery man dancing.

    Which btw is totally relevant to procedural animation.

    [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHWBEK8w_YY&quot;]Celery Man - YouTube[/ame]

    Or maybe this guy.
    7p7fSni.png?1
  • thatanimator
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    thatanimator polycounter lvl 6
    Mr.Mint wrote: »


    I seriously hate when people laugh at stuff like this..
    what's the joke?
    If I was the guy presenting this I'd just walk off...

    oh a cube is walking!! HAHAHHAHAHAH OH LAAAWD THAT SURE IS FUNNEH
  • Mr.Mint
    Uh,.. well, that was not my reason. It thought it is an interesting technique
    that might add to the subject.
  • thatanimator
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    thatanimator polycounter lvl 6
    Mr.Mint wrote: »
    Uh,.. well, that was not my reason. It thought it is an interesting technique
    that might add to the subject.

    I'd say I was refering to the crowd in the video and not to you though but sure whatevs :)
  • Mr.Mint
    Yep, that`s what I thought of later too, but I was already on my way to relatives. Everything is cool. ;)
  • Mark Dygert
    Blond wrote: »
    No I don't have anything against the game animators. It's more about how they're trying to cheapen and cheapen animation cost in video games resulting generally with characters that have soulless automated motions.
    That's kind of the problem though isn't it? How does an animator animate unpredictable motions that are out of their control?

    The things like secondary motion on the ears are hard to do when you have 3 animations blending together. How do you animate a scabbard reacting to being hit by 2 forces at once when they don't know when or how much force will be applied? In film you know exactly when and what is going to happen, you can plan for it and account but in games a lot of that is controlled by chaos.

    If it's handled with procedural motion, it can work.

    If you have an animator do it, they waste their time doing a bunch of "what if" animations making a giant bloated animation tree. Ask any game animator and they'll probably say they hate that part of their job because it breaks easily and is one of the more limiting parts of the job.

    It's not about doing it cheaper, its about doing better animation that responds to the unknown forces that are outside of animators control. I understand the whole "John Henry vs The Machine" thing and I don't like studios being lazy about their animation but I do like people being very smart and efficient with their animation and actually coming up with ways to handle those unknown forces.

    He's being incredibly efficient and is able to deliver higher quality, more responsive animation with less work (on the animators end). Where other studios throw more and more resources hoping the problem magically disappears into the sea of faces.

    That doesn't lead to higher wages or higher moral, that leads to a lot of low wage labor that ends up hating their grunt jobs because it's all a bunch of grunt work. At best they can aspire to be the lead or manger that oversees all those grunts, which just really means they are a "bitch filter" so upper management doesn't have to listen to the whining.

    How he approaches animation is VERY much how traditional animators (Les Clark, Milt Kahl, Eric Larson, Richard Williams ect...) would animate. Create key frames (the major frames that define the character and poses). Once the major motion flows right, let the assistants connect the dots. In this case his code handles the in-betweens so the animator covers more ground and focuses on what is important, defining the heart and soul of the character.

    Brilliant.

    It's how animation has worked for a very long time. Well... except for the ideological purists who force their coders to use punch cards and giant tape reels and force their texture artists to paint in oils and then scan them in once they dry. "That's what real ______ do!" BS, heh.

    Not to mention he is probably saving on a lot of technical overhead which means they can pour those resources into something else.
  • Makkon
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    Makkon polycounter
    I wonder if we could scrounge up a 3rd person Procedural Animation template in Unreal 4. Anyone want to learn blueprints with me?
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    I'd love to see a template like this in UE4, but I don't think I have much to offer in that area. Try posting on the Unreal Forums?
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