I know ****all about animation, and I've no interest in becoming an animator. And I still watch every single one of these videos, because Dan's passion basically burns through for this topic, with almost every single sentence. It's incredibly inspiring for my own interests. And also really, really insightful and entertaining.
Really enjoyed this episode. I particularly liked how you were discussing the need to fudge while what you were doing with Daxter in the footage coincidentally illustrated such a fudge (Daxter's 'jog in place' transitional animation between his run and idle animations). And switching to Tem Shop just as the Undertale question came up was pretty amusing too... I know it was just footage you didn't wind up using for the Jak and Daxter episodes and a collection of videogame covers that you inserted, but... The way those two things just happened to work perfectly was kind of cool.
It would be really interesting to see how animation work is done. Like a timelapse video with commentary, describing the tools, methods and problems of animation.
Dan, as someone who graduated from animation school, I just want to say that I find these videos not just entertaining and educational, but good watches in general. I look forward to seeing more of these in the future, because they are full of really great advice.
I'm working towards being an animator and find this incredibly interesting! I would love for a tech artist to come on the show in the future. Can't wait for more Q&As :)
same here... im getting real sick of people telling me to just practice too, been practicing since i was old enough to hold a pencil and i have not improved at all
I don't know how true it is, but I've seen that many stop motion animators 3d animate the whole scene beforehand(since you can interpolate between keyframes and clean things up) then stop motion animate as closely to that as possible... so yeah. Anything worth doing is worth doing twice.
+Jacob Mccann Yeah, I remember that this is exactly what was done with the short "The Diary of Ochibi," though that's 2-D stop motion so they base each frame on traditional animation instead. It uses very highly unconventional stop-motion media though. Some of them can be "traced," so to speak, and some of them cannot. The autumn scene was done with piles of dead leaves on a concrete floor, for instance. A camera pointed high above shows the leaves as they'd appear in the short, and a monitor nearby overlays the animation frames on top of the image so they can move the leaves to effectively trace each frame. The winter scene, however, uses a HUGE amount of clay mugs, one for each frame. That is, you're watching a rapid succession of mugs rapidly getting replaced in the same spot as mugs with a similar looking but slightly different images. Each frame is drawn onto one side of the mug, and cannot be easily traced because clay shrinks once baked. Also, the characters move across the mug, so they have to be drawn to compensate for how they'd look with the mug turned a particular angle away from the camera. Some of the mugs broke during production too and had to be re-created from scratch. Unfortunately, "The Diary of Ochibi" was taken down sometime last year by the rights holders. It's not available to legally view anywhere right now.
The awnser to the third (03:23) question is called "Lineal" or "Linear interpolation". IF your engine architecture guy knows what he is doing, he can make the "blend" feel smooth, by adjusting the algorithm behind it or setting it different for the keyframes. A more complex implementation for different animations is bi-cubic interpolation. Here is a more technical to non-technical talk about this technology: www.gdcvault.com/play/1020583/Animation-Bootcamp-An-Indie-Approach
Love the videos, and please keep doing them. It's nice to get questions answered especially since we can hardly expect you to think of every single thing we might want to know. I'm not an animator, but I love getting to know about this kind of stuff because it means I get to have a new appreciation for video games that I already love.
Loved the video, targeted answers for expansion of the previously covered material is quite nice IMO. In my experience as a content creator getting feedback and answering viewer questions was really nice, especially answering those questions of people who are genuinely curious and actively trying to expand knowledge of a topic.
So glad to hear that you don't pin down the exact timing of each animation before creating it! I always leave myself a little extra time to really feel out what makes it look best, but I thought I was doing it wrong! Thanks again for posting. :)
Hey Dan! I almost play no video games anymore (used to play a lot in my teens) but I thoroughly enjoy you guys talk about games, animation in general and all the stuff you do. As another guy also pointed out, your passion really shines through and it makes it worth watching.
I know several stop motion animators, and they all find it easier than animating in Maya. For some people, having the tactile feedback of actually moving something with your hands is very, very useful. There's no question that stop motion is least forgiving of mistakes, though.
"In some games, Characters "Snap" from one animation to the next, while in others they appear to flow freely between animations from pretty much any frame. What kinda of tech is involved in that?" As Dan talked about in the video , most game engines have what is known as an animtree(Ue3/UDK) or state machine which can handle blending from one animation to the next. Pending on the conditions of the game we can also created conditional animations along with blends. So say a player jumps, I can get the animators to give me an attack animation and starts in the jump "pose" that would allow a smoother blend into the attack animation then the standard idle or run pose. If your engine is also good enough and your programmers nice enough, you can get a lot of custom controllers that allow for custom blends or animation based on players inputs. The more custom controllers the more conditional animations or blends I can setup, and the smoother the whole game can look. "How do you get the "stop" frame of running animation right?" Typically from tech art view point it all comes down to good blending. From UE3 side, there is a blendbyspeed node that allows me to play different animations based on the characters velocity in the game. One of the tricks I have found for helping the stop issue is have some length of blend time on the down velocity coming to a stop. So when your character physically stops moving in the game world, I still have the walk/run animation play for a small amount of time. Typically talking 0.2 to 0.4 seconds pending the character and how heavy they are. This gives the player the feeling of soft stop, yet your physical collision box has come to a harsh stop in the world. Also thank you Dan for your Q&A videos. The more we can show the public just what all is involved in the production of a game, the more I think people will appreciate all the hard that goes into it.
Loving these videos. I find having the occasional Animation Q&A videos, on top of the long series, would be awesome. We can all learn more about things that are not mentioned in the actual long series. And as a student who once learned 2&3D animation for film, and am now learning Game Design, I find these videos very helpful in allowing me to see game animation in a more different perspective. It allowed me to animate for games much more effectively when working on game projects :) Thank you for taking the time to make them. Keep the videos coming~
Keep Doing More of These!! I love these sort of Q&A things because there are more focused on more specific questions and I just think they are wonderful, Do more!!!
Thanks for this, EC Crew, + Dan especially. Listening to this while I do some animation coursework at university! Just ordered the Animator's survival kit from Amazon too.
Haha, that bit on animation blending immediately made me think of Demon's Souls, try and use an invalid item (such as turpentine when you don't have a valid weapon, and then switch to grass and hammer square, your character will pass their arm through their head and then rotate it as if on a hinge behind their back. Oh yeah, you got the bone wheel shield in dark souls, use its spin attack (L2 usually, I think) and pay close attention to your character's wrist.
Your videos are my favorites of both channels. You give more detail which I appreciate, especially in these tricks of the trade videos. I'm not a video game industry worker but I do love games, and being able to have conversations with people about this stuff has been really fun.
Three very different things pulling me in three very different directions. On one front, you can't help but notice the finer details of Jak and Daxter as it plays in the background (and that further cements it in my mind as the most monumental achievement of a game of our or any time). On another, you have the fantastic music playing in the background. And then finally there's the subject matter of the video, Dan doing the Q&A. I genuinely don't know which part of the video I like most.
I'm more just interested in gaining a general knowledge of many things that interest me, rather than pursuing any of them as a career, but these videos are super super interesting to me! I also enjoy the humor - it's like a fun teacher in an elective class. Thank you!
As a dude who has some experience with animation myself (2D mostly) I definitely agree that stop-motion is just insane, though I haven't tried it myself. Respect to those guys.
Hey, Dan. Thanks for doing this! I really like when you guys talk about your areas of expertise, and it seems to bring out the best in EC. I hope you'll do more.
Just started replaying Windwaker (Not the remake, the original, I'm sure the remake will look even better but... Since I've got a working copy of the original and a way to play it, I don't see any reason to get the HD remake), and... Wow there's some really cool details on the animation in that game - A lot of it is on Link's facial expressions - Skiddle sideways, he has an expression for that. Lift a heavy jar? He has an expression for that. There's also an adorable sequence towards the start where he gets given an item by his grandma and goes into the Generic You Got A New Item pose during a sorrowful fairwell scene, catches himself, and looks kind of awkardly back to her, sort of a 'yeah, that wasn't really the time for that, sorry' conveyance of awkwardness and embarrassment on Link's part (contrast where Link gets an item in a serious cutscene of Skyward Sword and it just... Does the get a new item pose without any sense of self awareness). Which, in short... Please do Windwaker on this series at some point... Some really well done animation in it.
+Caleb Klusaw I have an Undertale ringtone, when he started talking about Undertale my phone rang and I thought he had just added some appropriate music for the topic. Almost missed that phone call.
Thank you! This was an awesome vid, left me wanting to ask way more questions lol. Just started at a company animating for games and I'm eating up all of your videos for extra knowledge lol. Keep em coming!
One notable exception to game characters that suddenly stop moving when they stop running is the character most associated with running, Sonic the Hedgehog. He's famous for the quick screeching stop that moves him a few feet down. The stage design in Sonic games have kept this trait in mind though, right from the start, strategically playing walls, springs, and stage gimmicks to stop or divert Sonic's momentum when needed. (Perhaps ironically, a remix of Green Hill Zone was playing during that explanation.) Also, looking at one of those...networks, is it called? At about 17:10, I see the 3-D model is of Sofia the First. Is someone making a Sofia the First game? Stop motion is indeed insane. What impresses me is how the staff of Robot Chicken can create the same amounts of footage per season with stop motion as is more normal types of animation.
+Overhazard I wouldn't say Sonic's famous for it, but there's another thing: that stopping animation makes you feel the inertia, and feeling the inertia adds greatly to feeling the speed, and in a game about speed, that's a really good thing to have. btw I also heard the music, but I wasn't sure if was it really Green Hill...
Яков Маламыжев Yeah, I guess it's not the most well-known trait of the character. Still, it is the first example I thought of where a game character does NOT stop on a dime, and it's an example of where this mechanic would not disrupt gameplay because stages are designed with it in mind.
I haven't animated in years, so I am far from an authority, but I used free motion capture libraries as a starting place for a lot of my animations, and they'd rarely look anything like the original. It helped me with the blocking issues mentioned at the beginning.
To toss in my two cents. For studying animation one resource I like is Eadweard Muybridge. An insane collection of frames of movement from 1888(yes, over 100 years old)
This was super fun Dan. In fact, I think I kinda understand what the animation maps mean, which surprises me (given I've never worked in animation) They kinda remind me of old Finite State Machines from my computer science classes, and it's not a huge stretch of imagination to think multiple states could be active at once, needing a blend between the two effects.
Yay, you answered my question. :D Really insightful stuff. I've been learning to build character models and background stuff with the intention of possibly doing some short films. The most animation experience I have is just pixelart animation. Mostly just walk cycles, so its going to be a steep learning curve.
+TheLifestream.net Well... you are about to learn why even small animation companies usually don't have the animators do the modeling and vice versa. SOME people are just awesome at everything. The rest of us find "animation" and "modeling" two very, very different skill-sets. Maybe you are that awesome someone that finds both modeling and animation to be equally easy. If not - try and focus on one or the other. (Hint - lots of free models/backgrounds available.) Custom gives way more creative options tho, so teamups are quite rewarding.
I guess you could say that stop motion animators are the tattoo artists of the animation world XD No mistakes allowed! And yes, I would like more videos like these :)
I just watched through this entire series which is fantastic - keep it up! I look forward to seeing rest of your 12 elements of animation series as well as your foray into Final Fantasy. I know the work has clearly got a lot harder with the added editing, but the improvements to the series really shows. I think Q&A videos will make good break episodes in the series. Also, maybe return to series you've already shown and compare the animations of later games in that series to the original you critiqued. It would be cool to know where they improved and didn't - especially in games that aren't looked at so fondly (to see if it is partly due to the animation that they aren't so notable - e.g. return to the God of War series and compare 3 to Ascension.
One answer to the whole "blending" of animations so they smoothly transition is a "State machine" Unity has this, it's a tool where you make a flow chart of animations, and you can tell it how fast and where to blend the animation to put them together. It's actually not all that complicated once you learn it.
I really like the Q&A video! I like learning stuff, but I'm not acquainted with animation at all. So I really like these short question then answer. It helps me understand better a field I don't know at all.
As an animator I don't mind mocap much. As you said it's limited in use (realistic human animation) so that means it will leave all the interesting stuff to keyframes animators: any animal, flying superheroes, huge monsters, transforming giant robots, cartoon characters, things like that. But maybe that's also because I'm rarely tasked with mocap cleanup, except when there is also some non mocaped shots to add in the middle. And that on the other hand is a pretty damn good challenge. I would go as far as to say it's actually good for an animator to take at least one mocap job in their career, considering all the body mechanic details you can assimilate from just watching the skeleton of your character. I've also found pixel-art animation really fun to create, especially at very low resolutions. Then it's really fast to draw but unlike more traditional animations, the difficulty comes less from finding the right timing and more to fit in the tiny space. When a movement over just a couple of pixels is already significant, you have to play a lot more with anticipations and trickery to convey the ideas. Really an interesting thing to try with a lot of very specific constraints.
man, videos like this are why I suggest to anyone I run into in everyday life that wants to get into games, to check out EC - such good tidbits of info throughout the years!
14:03 That's funny, because I feel like I'm pretty good at timing. I also spend a lot of idle time repeatedly drawing circles in art school(usually during breaks when I didn't feel like leaving). So, maybe he's really onto something there.
For these Q&A vids, I think they should be one of those "because I feel like it" sort of things. Or use them to give yourself a break in between games (like how early FF will start to feel too same-y for too long).
Playing the Final Fantasy series in order is one of the more fulfilling things I've done as a someone who appreciates game design. I'm Starting 4 tomorrow (The Cecil one) and I already see a lot of fun jumps in design skill. Love all your videos, and can't wait for the next ones :)
Haha, I'm doing stop motion animation right now as I have this on in the background! Stop motion is tough, but also very satisfying (if things go well).
How many animators are usually on AAA title teams? Depends on the studio & project. Bethesda has maybe a handful of people, most other studios have dozens of animators for each game. Source: The credits list of whatever game you're curious about.
If you're interested in covering a pixel-art game specifically for the animation subseries, I'd personally recommend digging into _Shantae_, particularly the Game Boy Color original. It had to contend with the limited color palette and whatever memory limitations there would have been on sprite sets, but it also had a clean, simple look that should make picking apart the individual frames easy. _Undertale_ would be close to the bottom of my recommendations honestly, since there's really not a lot to go on; the most complex animation there is the stuff in the fight screen, which is a total cheat with the higher resolution and the smooth, off-grid movements and such.
7:06 Dan:"In a game you can't really do that." Me: "Well i see someones never played warhammer 40k: Space marines and sprinted down a corridor and then stop suddenly."
This was really great. I was one of the people that asked about how framerates affect animation (I think the question in the video was mine). I think these would work best with a similar frequency as the Extra History Lies videos, but I'd definitely enjoy more of them. Do you have any plans to talk about how the camera works in animation? I'd ask something more specific, but I really don't know enough to ask a more informed question.
ANSWER THE QUESTION, DAN! ARE YOU A COCONUT?
Ask Dan an animation question! goo.gl/forms/7SlxqEdy4z
No, you are a head of lettuce.
+Extra Play this was wonderful
+Extra Play I don't think Dan is a coconut.
+Extra Play This was awesome! ^_^ I Really liked this!
+Extra Play Dan didn't answer if Dan was his real name.
I know ****all about animation, and I've no interest in becoming an animator.
And I still watch every single one of these videos, because Dan's passion basically burns through for this topic, with almost every single sentence. It's incredibly inspiring for my own interests. And also really, really insightful and entertaining.
I REALLY love the comedic timing with the first two questions :)
Loved it. it was a very fun watch.
It took me a good while to realize Dan=Daniel from Extra Credit/History
Who gives us the presentation
Really enjoyed this episode.
I particularly liked how you were discussing the need to fudge while what you were doing with Daxter in the footage coincidentally illustrated such a fudge (Daxter's 'jog in place' transitional animation between his run and idle animations). And switching to Tem Shop just as the Undertale question came up was pretty amusing too... I know it was just footage you didn't wind up using for the Jak and Daxter episodes and a collection of videogame covers that you inserted, but... The way those two things just happened to work perfectly was kind of cool.
Dan im sure people will like this. Dont worry
It would be really interesting to see how animation work is done. Like a timelapse video with commentary, describing the tools, methods and problems of animation.
Stop-motion animator are wizard... Hah... that's means I used to be a wizard. >:D
(Thanks, childhood LEGO stop-motion animations)
+xshot01 (Pento The Rabbit)
those were the good ole' days
I still want to do it but I have no idea where the toy boxes went ;-;
xshot01 (Pento The Rabbit)
I still have mine, but I lack the motivation to do it anymore
Wizards unite. (Same background)
As a starting 3D modeller and someone who is also interested in making animations I find this pretty helpful.
why.
why did you not call it "danimation danswers!"
+Gothic Octopus Well, "danimation" looks a lot like "damnation". So there's that.
12:02
Good answer.
Dan, as someone who graduated from animation school, I just want to say that I find these videos not just entertaining and educational, but good watches in general.
I look forward to seeing more of these in the future, because they are full of really great advice.
I'm working towards being an animator and find this incredibly interesting! I would love for a tech artist to come on the show in the future. Can't wait for more Q&As :)
I can't draw to save my life, but learning about animation this way is incredibly interesting. Keep em coming Dan!
same here... im getting real sick of people telling me to just practice too, been practicing since i was old enough to hold a pencil and i have not improved at all
I found the episode informative.
Probably not something you'd want to do often, but every once in awhile it's nice to air out questions.
I don't know how true it is, but I've seen that many stop motion animators 3d animate the whole scene beforehand(since you can interpolate between keyframes and clean things up) then stop motion animate as closely to that as possible... so yeah. Anything worth doing is worth doing twice.
+Jacob Mccann Yeah, I remember that this is exactly what was done with the short "The Diary of Ochibi," though that's 2-D stop motion so they base each frame on traditional animation instead. It uses very highly unconventional stop-motion media though. Some of them can be "traced," so to speak, and some of them cannot.
The autumn scene was done with piles of dead leaves on a concrete floor, for instance. A camera pointed high above shows the leaves as they'd appear in the short, and a monitor nearby overlays the animation frames on top of the image so they can move the leaves to effectively trace each frame.
The winter scene, however, uses a HUGE amount of clay mugs, one for each frame. That is, you're watching a rapid succession of mugs rapidly getting replaced in the same spot as mugs with a similar looking but slightly different images. Each frame is drawn onto one side of the mug, and cannot be easily traced because clay shrinks once baked. Also, the characters move across the mug, so they have to be drawn to compensate for how they'd look with the mug turned a particular angle away from the camera. Some of the mugs broke during production too and had to be re-created from scratch.
Unfortunately, "The Diary of Ochibi" was taken down sometime last year by the rights holders. It's not available to legally view anywhere right now.
The awnser to the third (03:23) question is called "Lineal" or "Linear interpolation". IF your engine architecture guy knows what he is doing, he can make the "blend" feel smooth, by adjusting the algorithm behind it or setting it different for the keyframes.
A more complex implementation for different animations is bi-cubic interpolation.
Here is a more technical to non-technical talk about this technology:
www.gdcvault.com/play/1020583/Animation-Bootcamp-An-Indie-Approach
Yes, please do more of these! It was really cool to get a blast of information from lots of different areas of animation like this!
As a pixel artist, i'm really hoping a whole video about pixel art =D
Is Dan really a coconut? Or is he more of a kiwi?
+Jarod Wilfred The bird or the fruit?
Coconut the bird.
+Timothy McLean or the Oceanian???
+Jarod Wilfred
But is that his real name?
_i thought he was a watermelon????_
Love the videos, and please keep doing them. It's nice to get questions answered especially since we can hardly expect you to think of every single thing we might want to know. I'm not an animator, but I love getting to know about this kind of stuff because it means I get to have a new appreciation for video games that I already love.
Loved the video, targeted answers for expansion of the previously covered material is quite nice IMO. In my experience as a content creator getting feedback and answering viewer questions was really nice, especially answering those questions of people who are genuinely curious and actively trying to expand knowledge of a topic.
So glad to hear that you don't pin down the exact timing of each animation before creating it! I always leave myself a little extra time to really feel out what makes it look best, but I thought I was doing it wrong! Thanks again for posting. :)
This QnA was really good, please keep them coming as long as there are good questions being asked!
omg the isle delfino music
my heart
I recognized that Tem Shop remix from Ben Briggs :D love that guy's stuff.
Extra play has become my favorite youtube channel, I check every night to see if there are new videos. Keep 'em coming!
Hey Dan!
I almost play no video games anymore (used to play a lot in my teens) but I thoroughly enjoy you guys talk about games, animation in general and all the stuff you do. As another guy also pointed out, your passion really shines through and it makes it worth watching.
I know several stop motion animators, and they all find it easier than animating in Maya. For some people, having the tactile feedback of actually moving something with your hands is very, very useful.
There's no question that stop motion is least forgiving of mistakes, though.
"In some games, Characters "Snap" from one animation to the next, while in others they appear to flow freely between animations from pretty much any frame. What kinda of tech is involved in that?"
As Dan talked about in the video , most game engines have what is known as an animtree(Ue3/UDK) or state machine which can handle blending from one animation to the next. Pending on the conditions of the game we can also created conditional animations along with blends. So say a player jumps, I can get the animators to give me an attack animation and starts in the jump "pose" that would allow a smoother blend into the attack animation then the standard idle or run pose. If your engine is also good enough and your programmers nice enough, you can get a lot of custom controllers that allow for custom blends or animation based on players inputs. The more custom controllers the more conditional animations or blends I can setup, and the smoother the whole game can look.
"How do you get the "stop" frame of running animation right?"
Typically from tech art view point it all comes down to good blending. From UE3 side, there is a blendbyspeed node that allows me to play different animations based on the characters velocity in the game. One of the tricks I have found for helping the stop issue is have some length of blend time on the down velocity coming to a stop. So when your character physically stops moving in the game world, I still have the walk/run animation play for a small amount of time. Typically talking 0.2 to 0.4 seconds pending the character and how heavy they are. This gives the player the feeling of soft stop, yet your physical collision box has come to a harsh stop in the world.
Also thank you Dan for your Q&A videos. The more we can show the public just what all is involved in the production of a game, the more I think people will appreciate all the hard that goes into it.
Loving these videos. I find having the occasional Animation Q&A videos, on top of the long series, would be awesome. We can all learn more about things that are not mentioned in the actual long series. And as a student who once learned 2&3D animation for film, and am now learning Game Design, I find these videos very helpful in allowing me to see game animation in a more different perspective. It allowed me to animate for games much more effectively when working on game projects :) Thank you for taking the time to make them. Keep the videos coming~
4:00 Overgrowth is a prime example of a game where every single animation cross blends.
Keep Doing More of These!! I love these sort of Q&A things because there are more focused on more specific questions and I just think they are wonderful, Do more!!!
Thanks for this, EC Crew, + Dan especially. Listening to this while I do some animation coursework at university! Just ordered the Animator's survival kit from Amazon too.
Haha, that bit on animation blending immediately made me think of Demon's Souls, try and use an invalid item (such as turpentine when you don't have a valid weapon, and then switch to grass and hammer square, your character will pass their arm through their head and then rotate it as if on a hinge behind their back.
Oh yeah, you got the bone wheel shield in dark souls, use its spin attack (L2 usually, I think) and pay close attention to your character's wrist.
I enjoy the Q&A, but I guess I enjoy everything you make so
"Stop motion animators are wizards"
You mean like... The Wizard of Speed and Time?
Your videos are my favorites of both channels. You give more detail which I appreciate, especially in these tricks of the trade videos. I'm not a video game industry worker but I do love games, and being able to have conversations with people about this stuff has been really fun.
I can't wait for the Final Fantasy series! I'm really interested in that franchise, although less in the games than just the idea of it existing.
Three very different things pulling me in three very different directions. On one front, you can't help but notice the finer details of Jak and Daxter as it plays in the background (and that further cements it in my mind as the most monumental achievement of a game of our or any time). On another, you have the fantastic music playing in the background. And then finally there's the subject matter of the video, Dan doing the Q&A. I genuinely don't know which part of the video I like most.
I am not an animator nor do I intend to but I love watching these kinds of videos. I love the series and the Q&As are great.
Yep, Dan, fun stuff. This sort of thing is as good as your normal episodes - everyone loves Q&As from content creators they like.
keep doing these dan, love the insight you can give this way
I'm more just interested in gaining a general knowledge of many things that interest me, rather than pursuing any of them as a career, but these videos are super super interesting to me! I also enjoy the humor - it's like a fun teacher in an elective class. Thank you!
I really liked this! Please make more!
Totally enjoyed this episode!! Great job!
As a dude who has some experience with animation myself (2D mostly) I definitely agree that stop-motion is just insane, though I haven't tried it myself. Respect to those guys.
Hey, Dan. Thanks for doing this! I really like when you guys talk about your areas of expertise, and it seems to bring out the best in EC. I hope you'll do more.
that sounds like sonic music at 5:20. and it is beautiful. thanks for the help btw!
Its great to see that an old childhood game of mine was getting the love it deserved ^^
Thank you for making this!
Just started replaying Windwaker (Not the remake, the original, I'm sure the remake will look even better but... Since I've got a working copy of the original and a way to play it, I don't see any reason to get the HD remake), and... Wow there's some really cool details on the animation in that game - A lot of it is on Link's facial expressions - Skiddle sideways, he has an expression for that. Lift a heavy jar? He has an expression for that. There's also an adorable sequence towards the start where he gets given an item by his grandma and goes into the Generic You Got A New Item pose during a sorrowful fairwell scene, catches himself, and looks kind of awkardly back to her, sort of a 'yeah, that wasn't really the time for that, sorry' conveyance of awkwardness and embarrassment on Link's part (contrast where Link gets an item in a serious cutscene of Skyward Sword and it just... Does the get a new item pose without any sense of self awareness). Which, in short... Please do Windwaker on this series at some point... Some really well done animation in it.
When that undertale music comes on
+Caleb Klusaw I have an Undertale ringtone, when he started talking about Undertale my phone rang and I thought he had just added some appropriate music for the topic. Almost missed that phone call.
Thank you! This was an awesome vid, left me wanting to ask way more questions lol. Just started at a company animating for games and I'm eating up all of your videos for extra knowledge lol. Keep em coming!
One notable exception to game characters that suddenly stop moving when they stop running is the character most associated with running, Sonic the Hedgehog. He's famous for the quick screeching stop that moves him a few feet down. The stage design in Sonic games have kept this trait in mind though, right from the start, strategically playing walls, springs, and stage gimmicks to stop or divert Sonic's momentum when needed. (Perhaps ironically, a remix of Green Hill Zone was playing during that explanation.)
Also, looking at one of those...networks, is it called? At about 17:10, I see the 3-D model is of Sofia the First. Is someone making a Sofia the First game?
Stop motion is indeed insane. What impresses me is how the staff of Robot Chicken can create the same amounts of footage per season with stop motion as is more normal types of animation.
+Overhazard
I wouldn't say Sonic's famous for it, but there's another thing: that stopping animation makes you feel the inertia, and feeling the inertia adds greatly to feeling the speed, and in a game about speed, that's a really good thing to have.
btw I also heard the music, but I wasn't sure if was it really Green Hill...
Яков Маламыжев
Yeah, I guess it's not the most well-known trait of the character. Still, it is the first example I thought of where a game character does NOT stop on a dime, and it's an example of where this mechanic would not disrupt gameplay because stages are designed with it in mind.
I haven't animated in years, so I am far from an authority, but I used free motion capture libraries as a starting place for a lot of my animations, and they'd rarely look anything like the original. It helped me with the blocking issues mentioned at the beginning.
Yeah this video was fun and enlightening!
Intense mindgames by Soraiyah.
Looking forward to more of these in the future. Was very interesting and informative
To toss in my two cents. For studying animation one resource I like is Eadweard Muybridge. An insane collection of frames of movement from 1888(yes, over 100 years old)
I really enjoyed this, thanks for the insight Dan!
This video series is wonderful.
Yeah, this is totally good. Dig it.
This was super fun Dan. In fact, I think I kinda understand what the animation maps mean, which surprises me (given I've never worked in animation)
They kinda remind me of old Finite State Machines from my computer science classes, and it's not a huge stretch of imagination to think multiple states could be active at once, needing a blend between the two effects.
Yay, you answered my question. :D Really insightful stuff.
I've been learning to build character models and background stuff with the intention of possibly doing some short films. The most animation experience I have is just pixelart animation. Mostly just walk cycles, so its going to be a steep learning curve.
+TheLifestream.net Well... you are about to learn why even small animation companies usually don't have the animators do the modeling and vice versa. SOME people are just awesome at everything. The rest of us find "animation" and "modeling" two very, very different skill-sets.
Maybe you are that awesome someone that finds both modeling and animation to be equally easy. If not - try and focus on one or the other. (Hint - lots of free models/backgrounds available.) Custom gives way more creative options tho, so teamups are quite rewarding.
Loved this. Thanks Dan!
Please do more, this is great!
I guess you could say that stop motion animators are the tattoo artists of the animation world XD No mistakes allowed!
And yes, I would like more videos like these :)
Thank you men !!
great video :D really liked it
I just watched through this entire series which is fantastic - keep it up! I look forward to seeing rest of your 12 elements of animation series as well as your foray into Final Fantasy. I know the work has clearly got a lot harder with the added editing, but the improvements to the series really shows.
I think Q&A videos will make good break episodes in the series. Also, maybe return to series you've already shown and compare the animations of later games in that series to the original you critiqued. It would be cool to know where they improved and didn't - especially in games that aren't looked at so fondly (to see if it is partly due to the animation that they aren't so notable - e.g. return to the God of War series and compare 3 to Ascension.
I would very much enjoy more Q&A videos.
One answer to the whole "blending" of animations so they smoothly transition is a "State machine" Unity has this, it's a tool where you make a flow chart of animations, and you can tell it how fast and where to blend the animation to put them together. It's actually not all that complicated once you learn it.
+mkhpsyco Oh, looks like near the end there, you showed a bunch of images of different kinds of state machines. Fun stuff.
Loved the Q&A, Dan! It was an interesting interview :)
I really like the Q&A video! I like learning stuff, but I'm not acquainted with animation at all. So I really like these short question then answer. It helps me understand better a field I don't know at all.
Loved this! keep 'em coming
This is up there with James' hearthstone vids. Keep it up bro!
As an animator I don't mind mocap much. As you said it's limited in use (realistic human animation) so that means it will leave all the interesting stuff to keyframes animators: any animal, flying superheroes, huge monsters, transforming giant robots, cartoon characters, things like that. But maybe that's also because I'm rarely tasked with mocap cleanup, except when there is also some non mocaped shots to add in the middle. And that on the other hand is a pretty damn good challenge. I would go as far as to say it's actually good for an animator to take at least one mocap job in their career, considering all the body mechanic details you can assimilate from just watching the skeleton of your character.
I've also found pixel-art animation really fun to create, especially at very low resolutions. Then it's really fast to draw but unlike more traditional animations, the difficulty comes less from finding the right timing and more to fit in the tiny space. When a movement over just a couple of pixels is already significant, you have to play a lot more with anticipations and trickery to convey the ideas. Really an interesting thing to try with a lot of very specific constraints.
man, videos like this are why I suggest to anyone I run into in everyday life that wants to get into games, to check out EC - such good tidbits of info throughout the years!
14:03 That's funny, because I feel like I'm pretty good at timing. I also spend a lot of idle time repeatedly drawing circles in art school(usually during breaks when I didn't feel like leaving). So, maybe he's really onto something there.
For these Q&A vids, I think they should be one of those "because I feel like it" sort of things. Or use them to give yourself a break in between games (like how early FF will start to feel too same-y for too long).
16:49 HOLY CRAP THAT'S AWESOME! O_O
+Annekewren Yeah, it really is!
At the 17 minute mark, you triggered the engineers flowchart instinct within me
I enjoyed this. Educational as usual.
Playing the Final Fantasy series in order is one of the more fulfilling things I've done as a someone who appreciates game design. I'm Starting 4 tomorrow (The Cecil one) and I already see a lot of fun jumps in design skill. Love all your videos, and can't wait for the next ones :)
This is great I'd love to see more!
Haha, I'm doing stop motion animation right now as I have this on in the background! Stop motion is tough, but also very satisfying (if things go well).
14:28 that answer was 100% CGP Grey-esque. I love it :v
+Pedro Scoponi "desk covered in sticky notes" Grey would NOT approve that part!
Yeah, this was fun to watch, so more of these would be nice =D
How many animators are usually on AAA title teams?
Depends on the studio & project. Bethesda has maybe a handful of people, most other studios have dozens of animators for each game.
Source: The credits list of whatever game you're curious about.
Thanks for the video Dan. Please do more of these :)
Really liked this one.
If you're interested in covering a pixel-art game specifically for the animation subseries, I'd personally recommend digging into _Shantae_, particularly the Game Boy Color original. It had to contend with the limited color palette and whatever memory limitations there would have been on sprite sets, but it also had a clean, simple look that should make picking apart the individual frames easy. _Undertale_ would be close to the bottom of my recommendations honestly, since there's really not a lot to go on; the most complex animation there is the stuff in the fight screen, which is a total cheat with the higher resolution and the smooth, off-grid movements and such.
I liked this. it variate the channel and breaks your mind set to think of other things.
I loved this Q&A would really like to see more.
SENSEI NOTICED ME!!!
and yeah, if you are gonna do a game animation episode on Pixel Art, Darkstalkers should be at the top.
+fawfulmark2 Darkstalkers? wouldn't Street Fighter Alpha 3 be better? I like Darkstalkers more, but I think animation in SFA3 was better
7:06 Dan:"In a game you can't really do that."
Me: "Well i see someones never played warhammer 40k: Space marines and sprinted down a corridor and then stop suddenly."
This was really great. I was one of the people that asked about how framerates affect animation (I think the question in the video was mine). I think these would work best with a similar frequency as the Extra History Lies videos, but I'd definitely enjoy more of them.
Do you have any plans to talk about how the camera works in animation? I'd ask something more specific, but I really don't know enough to ask a more informed question.
Very interesting, Dan!
Great video! Real fun!