Animation for videogames: roundtable: next-generation platforms are affecting the way today's videogames are designed and animated

Post, May, 2005 by Ann Fisher

Animators of videogames are changing their primary software packages, emphasizing richly-detailed characters and expecting a leap in animation talent.

"In the past, game animators would have been required to make a good run loop, to make a good dying loop, but now we're asking for hitting the mark and hitting the point where the lighting works well, and basically creating drama," says Steve Sinclair, lead programmer for Digital Extremes, who's working on a next-gen title. "Before it was just creating plausability, [now] we want to create a sense of dramatic purpose."

The power in next-gen console platform games is just too much to ignore--even computer games makers are putting out their titles for consoles. Read on to see the how the next gen is changing all facets of videogame animation production.

STEVE SINCLAIR

Lead programmer, Digital Extremes

(www.digitalextremes.com), Toronto

Current project/platform: Dark Sector, a third-person shooter-adventure game; next-gen platforms. Digital Extremes is best known for its first-person shooter games, notably the Unreal series done in cooperation with Epic. The Toronto studio just finished Pariah, for PlayStation 2.

How are next-gen platforms changing the way you work?

"They are increasing consumer expectation, so it changes the way we work in that we have to get the best tools we possibly can, develop new techniques and increase our animators' skill, as well as everyone else's on staff. The competition is increasing and the capabilities of the hardware have increased to the point where the level of detail, at least the graphic fidelity, means that a lot more work has to go into creating the assets. Before you had to make a 300-triangle mesh for Unreal and now it's in the millions, so that changes the way we work quite a bit."

What's the most important element in your games?

"The character [we are working on that is still unnamed] is special ... the suit [he wears] changes and that basically has a lot of implications for animation. We're trying to make the character interact a lot more with the environment, and that's why we're putting them on screen. We haven't done a [third-person shooter] before. Usually we're first-person, but now because of the emphasis of the character, and the strong character design, we want to put him on screen. By having a different camera, that affects the control systems, so it makes the animation of that main character and the quality of that animation way more important. As far as animation goes, we're doing basically as much as we've done before, just another 10 to 20 percent, and that is things like supporting multi-limb blending. And that's just animation blending to the 'nth' degree so he's running but he's also shooting his gun with one hand and the other hand is held out in front of him."

What's your most important tool?

"Here we look for a lot of third-party tools that we can put in our pipeline. A notable one for this next generation in terms of creating characters--human or monsters--is ZBrush. This is something the film industry is also starting to get into; they're all using this tool. It's something like a virtual 3D sculpting tool and it also can assist in creating really detailed stuff and rigging it for animation. That is something that a couple of our guys are getting up to speed on. Our animators are using the latest version of Softimage|XSI to do their rigging and their animation. We have used 3DS Max, LightWave and Softimage|XSI. We do most of our scenic aspects and layout of how levels will work--placing where the monsters appear and so on--with LightWave. Character animation on some of our previous titles was done with Max. That includes Pariah, which is something our Toronto studio is just finishing up.

"Softimage|XSI is new for us. How that applies to the next gen is it can handle high poly previews so much better than anything we've used, and that's really drawn us to it. [In terms of hardware, we] usually open the magazine and pick the most expensive PC. Generally, we try to upgrade every six to 10 months because the bulk of our cost here is man-hours not hardware, which is pretty cheap. Currently, one animator just got a new machine, an Athlon 64 with a couple gigs of RAM, running Windows."

How important is animator experience level?

"We're trying to build this character we're working on into someone you want to be and someone who's important for a new franchise, like Dark Sector. So that is [accomplished] at times through non-interactive cut scenes and those are all done in-house within the game engine so you don't get the luxuries of offline rendering. In our past games, we did not have these segments of storytelling, so now that we do those are intensely character focused. So we need to have great motion, great acting, a good sense of drama. Because we are a small shop, we're looking for someone who has not only skills to make the animation look good but also a good sense of shot composition and reasonable sense of mood."