Animation for games: stylized or real, PC and console characters offer sophisticated actions, looks and stories

Post, March, 2005 by Ann Fisher, Claudia Kienzle

According to leading marketing information provider. The NPD Group, annual 2004 US retail sales of videogames (which includes portable and console hardware, software and accessories) saw sales of over $9.9 billion--a decline of less than one percent when compared to $10 billion in annual 2003. However, while dollar sales were down slightly, total industry unit sales were up four percent over the same period last year.

For the first time ever sales of portable software titles broke the $1 billion mark. Total software sales also continued to set new records, with sales exceeding $6.2 billion, an increase of eight percent in overall sales when compared to $5.8 billion in 2003.

"The 2004 sales figures are impressive, especially as we enter the twilight of this hardware cycle and, more significantly, looking ahead, the videogame industry shows no signs of slowing down" says Douglas Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association, the trade association representing US computer and videogame publishers. "No other entertainment industry has posted the sustained growth over the last decade generated by the videogame sector, and given the technological and creative advances ahead, all signs point to surging growth and more record sales for many years to come."

For a healthy forecast of the videogame industry, ask Jacques Dussault, lead animator at Ubisoft, a Montreal-based game publisher with a dozen more development studios worldwide. "The industry has grown tremendously in the past five to 10 years and we're expecting the industry will double its size in the next seven years," he says.

The art and skill of animators is critical to developing characters that game players will want to return to over and over again. Many of those companies interviewed are creating and publishing series titles or specific genre titles that build on previous action, looks and storylines.

"We have a big variety of backgrounds [here at the studio], people who come from 2D animation that convert to 3D," says Dussault. "We have very technical animators, some of them used to be programmers and became animators. We have people who are able to look at any problem in a very different way, and we have specialized people who are known for doing very great keyframe animation with a lot of personality in it. We have other animators who are very good at using the engine and being able to render something that will add personality to their characters, but through the tools and through the engine and coding."

SPLINTER CELL CHAOS THEORY

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, to be released March 31 for PC, XBox, GameCube and PS2, is the third in this stealth game series. The main character, Sam Fisher, is very realistic with his moves and high-tech gear, which are ultra-modern and slightly sci-fi, a trademark look of the Tom Clancy games. Ubisoft (www.ubisoft.qc.ca) creates and publishes many Clancy properties.

The animators wanted to "push the envelope on the look of Sam Fisher," says Dussault, which they did with normal mapping, a 3D texturing/displacement technique not available for previous Splinter Cell games. "It gives you the chance to put a lot of very small details on characters without adding texture, modeling and rendering all the time. So you can have wrinkles or frowns around the eyes of a character with just the texture and it looks absolutely real and reacts to the light and the shadows around you as it should."

Ubisoft animators explored other new technologies like Full Body IK (Inverse Kinematics), which allowed Sam to walk and move more naturally. "You always feel like the weight is at the right place, it won't be stopping and snapping all the time," says Dussault. Their tools were Kaydara's Human IK software (now an Alias product) connected the Ubisoft's heavily-modified Unreal engine. For modeling and animation, they used Discreet 3DS Max and Character Studio on Dell PCs. Animation is keyframed because "we have very good and very experienced animators who can render realistic animation," he says, adding that motion capture had too many limits.

The game is interactive at all times, the player is always able to move and watch, pointing the camera in any direction. Facial animation, though upgraded, was probably the least important part of the character. "You get expressions, you can see some fear in his face and if he feels very confident. But those are applied to complete the character, so it's not the main focus. We tried to put the expressions of the character through the body," says Dussault.

Ubisoft spent two years producing this game. The first Splinter Cell was made in Montreal, the second in Shanghai and this one back in Montreal. The company wanted the production flexibility to shift its animators to different titles.

MERCENARIES

Released in January 2005 for XBox and PS2, Mercenaries was created by Pandemic Studios (www.pandemicstudios.com) and published by LucasArts. It is a first-person shooter game. This military action title follows last year's Full Spectrum Warrior, which was adapted from an actual US Army training game. Mercenaries is a more fictionalized game, more akin to comic book character design in terms of looks and movement. There are three mercenaries--an African-American, a British gal of Chinese descent and a Swede--whose mission is to collect bounties and blow things up.