Game Anim

Video Game Animation Explained

Jonathan Cooper

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000357806
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Graphics
• Index: Computer Science

Game Anim teaches the technical and artistic fundamentals of video game animation and goes further to provide practical advice and industry insights to help you become a rounded and successful game animator.

Covering every stage of game production from the animator's perspective, it is packed with the lessons learned from working on a variety of game types in both in-game and cinematic roles in animator, lead, and director positions. These have been successful across multiple studios regardless of team, size and culture.

The 2nd edition includes a new chapter on 2D and Pixel Art Animation, an enhanced mocap chapter covering the latest developments in Motion Matching, and even more interviews with top professionals in the field.

Game Anim provides essential guidance to those looking to break into the industry and successful animators wishing to take the next step in their career.

Key Features

• 20 Years of Insight: Accumulated knowledge from 2 decades of experience in all areas of game animation.

• The 5 Fundamentals: Reinterprets the classic 12 animation principles and sets out 5 new fundamentals for great game animation.

• Animator Interviews: Notable game animators offer behind-the-scenes stories, tips, and advice.

• Free Animation Rig: Free "AZRI" maya rig, tutorials and other resources on the accompanying website: www.gameanim.com/book

CHAPTER 1

The Video Game Animator

What It Means to Be a Video Game Animator

So you want to be a video game animator, but what exactly does that entail? And what, if any, are the differences between a video game animator and those in the more traditional linear mediums of film and television? While there are certainly a lot of overlap and shared skills required to bring a character to life in any medium, there are many unique technical limitations, and opportunities, in the interactive artform.

Artistry and Creativity

To begin with, having a keen eye for the observation of movement in the world around you (and a desire to replicate and enhance it for your own creative ends) is the first step to becoming a great game animator. The willingness to not only recreate these motions but to envision how this movement might be controlled by yourself and others, allowing players to embody the characters you create, is a key factor in separating game animators from the non-interactive animators of linear mediums.

Understanding key fundamentals of weight, balance, mass, and momentum to ensure your characters are not only pleasing to the eye but meet with the player’s understanding of the physics of the worlds they will inhabit are equally essential. A desire to push the envelope of visual and interaction fidelity within your explorable worlds, which can afford players new stories and experiences they could never have in the real world, with believable characters that are as real to them as any created in another medium, is a driving force in pushing this still-young medium forward.

The ultimate goal is immersion—where players forget they are in front of a screen (or wearing a virtual/augmented-reality headset), escaping their own physical limitations and instead being transported into our virtual world, assuming their character’s identity such that it is “they themselves” (and no longer their avatar) who are in the game.

Technical Ability

Beautiful animations are only the first challenge. Getting them to work in the game and play with each other seamlessly in character movement systems is the real challenge. The best game animators get their hands dirty with the technical side of seeing their animations through every step of the way into the game. A good game animation team will balance animators with complementary levels of technical and artistic abilities, but strength in both areas is only ever a good thing.

Only in thoroughly understanding tools, processes, and existing animation systems will new creative opportunities open up to animators willing to experiment and discover new techniques and methods that might make animation creation more efficient or increase quality.

Animation inside a game engine.

Teamwork

Beyond simply making motions look clean and fluid, it is a game animator’s responsibility to balance multiple (sometimes conflicting) desires to make a video game. A finished game is always more than the sum of its parts, and when all of a development team’s disciplines pull in the same direction in unison this when we delight and surprise players the most.

Animators must work in concert with designers, programmers, artists, audio technicians, and more to bring their creations to life, so those harboring a desire to sit with headphones on and the door closed, focusing solely on their own area, will be quickly left behind in the race to create the best possible experiences.

A game animator can only truly succeed with a good awareness of the other disciplines in game development and the ability to speak their language, empathize with their needs, and know at least a little of all areas of game development.

Design Sense

Game animations do not exist in a bubble and are not simply created to look good, but must serve a purpose for the greater game. Animators handling player character animation, especially, must balance a game’s “feel” with visual fidelity (though the two are not mutually exclusive).

Designers touting conventional wisdom will often fall back on the tenet of quicker animations equaling better and more reactive characters, but go too fast without the appropriate visual feedback and the characters will simply not exist believably in the world, destroying the illusion of life and hurting the tactile gameplay “feel” in the opposing direction. Ultimately, it is a game animator’s responsibility to create consistency in the game world, with everything displaying a relative weight and physics, with gravity being a constant throughout.

In game development, we might hope that “everyone is a designer,” but the best game designers are the keepers of the game’s goals with an idea of how to reach them. It is the game animators’ role to know enough of design to ensure their creations do not hurt but serve the design goals while maintaining visual fidelity as much as possible.

Accepting the Nature of the Medium

It goes without saying that a great game animator must be passionate about their chosen field, but they must also understand that this chosen field is not just animation but game development as a whole.

Those wishing for the more easily scheduled approach of traditional linear animation production will likely grow frustrated with the fluid nature of game development. You cannot plan how many iterations it will take a new mechanic to be fun, so it follows that you must always be open to schedules in a state of flux.

Avoid being precious about your work because it will change or be thrown away, but, similarly, don’t be dissuaded, because you will always improve and refine your animation as the game progresses, no matter how many times you might rework it.

Life Experience

The best game animators love playing games and can find something to learn from every work, but they also go beyond simply referencing other games or movies. If we wish to truly improve our artistic works (and gaming as a whole), we must escape the echo chamber of comparing with and copying our peers and instead bring as much of our own varied life experience into our work as possible.

The blandest games are those that only reference their competition, and the most pedestrian animation choices are inspired only by other animations. Be passionate about games, but also be passionate about life and the world around you, and get away from the screen outside of work as much as possible.

Different Areas of Game Animation

While game animators in larger teams typically specialize, those at smaller studios may wear the many hats listed below. Regardless, even when specializing, it is incredibly valuable to understand other areas of game animation to open up opportunities for creativity across disciplines—often, the best results occur when lines are blurred such that an animator might excel in all moving aspects of a game.

Player Character Animation

The primary and easily the most challenging aspect of game animation is the motion of characters under the player’s control. This occurs in all but the most abstract of games and therefore is an important skill to focus on and for any game animator to have under his or her belt.

Character animation style and quality can vary greatly across different game types (and studios), depending upon their unique goals, but one thing is becoming more apparent as the medium progresses—bad character animation is unacceptable these days. Bringing up the baseline standard is one of the main goals of this book.

The Assassin is an excellent example of player character movement. (Copyright 2007–2017 Ubisoft Entertainment. All Rights Reserved. Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft, and the Ubisoft logo are trademarks of Ubisoft Entertainment in the US and/or other countries.)

Facial Animation

Facial animation is a relatively recent requirement, due to advances in the quality of characters. When we bring the cameras in close enough (especially on more realistic fac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Author
• Chapter 1: The Video Game Animator
• Chapter 2: The Game Development Environment
• Chapter 3: The 12 Animation Principles
• Chapter 4: The Five Fundamentals of Game Animation
• Chapter 5: What You Need to Know
• Interview: Mark Grigsby
• Chapter 6: The Game Animation Workflow
• Interview: Adrián Miguel
• Chapter 7: Our Project: Pre Production
• Interview: Eric Chahi
• Chapter 8: Our Project: Technical Animation
• Interview: Masanobu Tanaka
• Chapter 9: Our Project: Gameplay Animation
• Interview: Mariel Cartwright
• Chapter 10: Our Project: Cinematics and Facial
• Interview: Marie Celaya
• Chapter 11: Our Project: Motion Capture
• Interview: Bruno Velazquez
• Chapter 12: Our Project: Animation Team Management
• Interview: Yoshitaka Shimizu
• Chapter 13: Our Project: Polish and Debug
• Interview: Alex Drouin
• Chapter 14: 2D and Pixel Art Animation
• Interview: Ben Fiquet
• Chapter 15: The Future
• Index