Animation for games: thanks to more powerful tools, animators are creating more challenges for themselves and gamers - video game production companies are creating innovative games with new technologies

Post, May, 2003 by Ann Fisher

The world of videogames has changed over the past few years. Creatively they are much more interesting. Visually, they are much more captivating. New game titles have to be if there is any hope of capturing market share.

According to the NPD Group (www.npd.com), a leading market information company, in 2002 the videogame industry generated $10.3 billion. This was up from $9.4 billion in 2001. Hardware sales went down as console makers dramatically dropped their prices, so unit sales went up. More gamers are coming to the table and this study states, "the full power of the current generation of hardware is still unrealized."

Animators of games have no choice but to push every button they can. This can lead to some challenges because, inevitably, these animators are using beta versions of software or using techniques like multi-character motion capture or scaling down high-resolution cinematics to low-resolution action heroes. There often is a little bleeding along the way.

What are some of the challenges facing animators who have recently worked on new-games? Read on...

COMPANY: Microids in Montreal

PROJECT: Syberia (in-house), 9/02 release. Syberia 2, 11/03 release; PC

A huge gamble for Microids (514-390-0333; its Web site www.microids is geared for its European users and market) -- it invested $2.5 million US, the most for one of its projects ever -- 2002's Syberia has won accolades from all corners for its globe-trotting adventure tale depicted in the style of famous European comic-book writer Benoit Sokal, who collaborated on its development More than three dozen people worked on the project, including eight to 10 animators, in the Montreal development studio, which is now larger than its original Paris location, founded 16 years ago.

The story follows a New York lawyer who goes to Europe to buy a toy factory whose owner suddenly dies. She then must track all over the continent to find a long-lost brother, Its visuals fuse realism and comic-book styles.

CHALLENGE: Time and the plug-in learning curve.

"The main challenge is time, it's always the same," says lead animator Frederic Gagne. Of the two different animation types in the game, the action and full motion video cinematics, the latter had really high resolution characters which presented big rendering challenges.

For Syberia, Microids animators used optical motion capture at their own studio and at Kaydara, which is also based in Montreal. There were about 1,000 mocap shots. The data was taken into Discreet 3DS Max V.4.2 and Character Studio. Added to that were various plug-ins -- Digimation shaghair for anything hair related, Digimation Stitch for clothing and Digimation AfterBurn for dust, smoke and explosions. The hardware was Pentium 4 1.6GB Dell, IBM, Mansoft boxes and clones. The operating system was Windows NT.

SOLUTION: The plug-in problem was solved by the next, more full-bodied Max V5, which Microids is using on Syberia 2. Unfortunately, that wasn't available when production began on the first title two years ago.

The rendering farm was also enlarged and the animation team "worked on learning how to work with more layers. We could have the same quality of image with lighter results," says Gagne. "We experiment and stay here late at night. We have a good relationship with Discreet and they come here to teach us things, but they cannot spend their whole life here and you have to go forward."

COMPANY: Pandemic in Santa Monica

PROJECT: Four titles in production; PlayStation 2

Pandemic (www.pandemicstudios.com) is currently working on four titles in the US. Its animators use Softimage\XSI for modeling, texturing and animation, a single software solution that aids efficiency, says executive art director Carey Chico.

CHALLENGE: "The main challenges were trying to get a system that would be easy to work with, elegant to maintain and efficient to our pipeline," says Chico." The blending usually is the hardest part to resolve since there are many solutions to the problem."

SOLUTION: A new proprietary animation system was used in three of the four titles currently in process.

"It works in conjunction with Softimage\XSI," explains Chico. "Softimage comes to the table with an extensive nonlinear animation system which allows us a great deal of flexibility with both mocap and hand-made animations, We have the ability now to get motion capture onto our models and then animate on top of it in a nondestructive way. This provides us a quicker and easier way to generate looping animation from the mocap to best suit our characters in the games. With support for offset curves, we can actually animate on top of key-per-frame mocap data in-an easy way. This greatly affects our ability to produce top-notch mocap animation for our games.

"This system also works well with straight hand-created animation," continues Chico. "With the clip system, we can combine animations together and blend the results very easily. In addition, we can select a portion of the body, such as the upper torso, and separate its-animation from the lower torso. This greatly reduces the amount of data that we bring into the console itself, allowing us to better conserve that memory. We can retain the run cycle for the lower torso while changing the position of the upper torso to allow the user to control the direction and facing of the character. Since most of our games now have third-person action combat modes, this greatly enhances the look and feel of the character."