Animation for games: tools help reward risk takers

Post, May 1, 2002 by Ann Fisher

Animators for games are riding a wave that has yet to crest. It is a thrilling, though slightly precarious, place to be. Coupled with the introduction of Microsoft's XBox, Nintendo's GameCube and Sony's PlayStation 2 (PS2) all within the past two years, game developers have released about 100 titles for all three platforms to date. Gaming industry analysts predict peak saturation in the console market by 2004 when they forecast there will be about 1,000 titles for those consoles. Animation quality will be a key factor in moving those games. The DVD market is swelling too and the supplemental material on these titles often relies heavily on animation. Immersive menus, games, original animations -- all add to the quality of the DVD. Animators working on these games and DVD titles realize it is up to them to distinguish their projects from the pack. What follows are tales from a few risk takers.

SUPER 78 (www.super78.com), a boutique animation studio in Hollywood, created the animated cinematics for Pac Man Party and Pac Man World 2 for Namco and game developer Mass Media. The titles, for XBox and PS2 platforms, were released this spring.

THE RISK: Switching from Discreet 3D Studio Max version 3.1 to version 4.0 in production midstream on Pac Man World 2.

"Our animator, Mike McReynolds, was the big risk taker -- people are always afraid to move into an upgrade when they first start a project -- and he explored all the tools. He was the guy who shared all the knowledge on all the really great improvements on Max4. It really helped us out, all through modeling and animating," says creative director Brent Young. "Usually I don't like to upgrade to a new release unless it's more of a 3.0 to 3.1 or 3.5. Going to a full new release like 4.0, it's kind of scary because you don't know what all the bugs are going to be -- if all your [time-intensive] models and animations are going to translate."

There were more challenges. Though the spherical Pac Man looks like an easy model to build and animate, 3DS Max had trouble morphing between multiple objects with the same vertice/face count. The spherical shapes would mutate, says Young. So they tried Alias\Wavefront Maya, whose NURBS-based environment doesn't depend on vertice counts. However, building models in Maya and bringing them back to Max was a dismal failure. Ultimately, they stayed in Max and animated the spherical shapes with animated booleans, though even then the motion blur of the animated booleans still caused some models to explode. It was a random problem that the animators solved by rerendering certain frames.

TIP: Stay in one 3D package because you can experiment and think that it's going to work but in the long run you could be running into bigger problems, says Young.

In the end, Young praised 3DS Max v.4.0 for being much quicker because of a new built-in nonlinear animation tool which superseded the package's character Studio or other plug-ins. Taking that risk, moving from one version to another was worth it. The Super 78 studio spent three months creating more than five minutes of 3D CG, models and everything from conception through final compositing. Editing was done on Media 100s. 3DS Max ran on Dell workstations, and Adobe After Effects running on Dells and Mac G4s was used for compositing and effects.

PANDEMIC STUDIOS (www.pandemicstudios.com) in Santa Monica is creating animation for Star Wars: Clone Wars, a videogame for Nintendo GameCube that mirrors this summer's feature release. The game, expected to be released this fall, is a fast action combat game set in the Star Wars universe.

THE RISK: Staying true to the game's original idea while the projected release date shrunk by six months. Also, there was always the risk of not satisfying the game's designers and programmers; everyone wanted a little something during the animation creation process. On Star Wars, the designers wanted to incorporate a Jedi combat mode which caused the animators to spend a lot of time solving a less-than-robust IK system on the game side. Animation cycles were simplified and, therefore, looked better Designers wanted characters to run "just a bit faster" so animators had to make adjustments to avoid something too "cartoony." Programmers had their own needs like having the assets work consistently. For instance, animators had to create same-size doorways so soldiers' bounding boxes would fit through each one.

In-house proprietary toolsets were used to edit missions and place assets in the game engine. Softimage\XSI 2.0 was used for 3D animation creation. Art director Carey Chico praised the software for its "fantastic polygonal modeler and texturing applications. The poly modeling tools in XSI emphasize the philosophy of a small, tight number of tools that, when combined, provide for an unlimited number of operations," he says. "Also, the subdivisional surface technologies allows us to model and texture in a lower resolution and then increase the resolution by pressing a key with the the textures remaining in place." Chico also plugged XSI's built-in feature "sub-projections" as a killer tool that aligned texture to a series of faces. This next-gen console game had high-detail bells and whistles. The vehicles animated while moving.