Animation Bootcamp: An Indie Approach to Procedural Animation 

Seems genius but all these processes make the game run terrible on pretty much any hardware, which is honestly a shame

@@TheGooGaming It's more so optimization. Its a bit more taxing but still.

@@TheGooGaming That's simply very far from true. Normal animation is probably more taxing (depending on engine) in that it still needs to grab data from ram and apply it for each frame. You could calculate hundreds of millions of interpolations a second, yet only need about 60 for each instance. I can't think of why it wouldn't take only one CPU instruction to calculate the interpolation value of any given instance.

trolln

@@BassRukarioGuerrero No not necessarily. An animation consists of a relatively large data set where each frame is dependent on keyframes and the previous frames, so all that data has to be worked on to calculate bone angles for each frame, rather than just interpolating between 2 values according to simple math via one or few instructions.

I watched this one year ago and didn't understand shit but i rewatched it now and I'm proud of myself for understanding it lol

​@@mishikokenkebashvili879me too lol

he would actually make some great courses if he did

Agreed, I'd really love to have the know how to do such good outstanding animation.

Yeah this would be a great course but it would certainly be at least 30-40 hours long - not a small topic and particularly when aimed at indies that more often than not do not come from programming backgrounds

I know I've been researching this topic for over a year at this point

Enrique Have you found any other good ones you can recall from your research?

Fuck animation and graphics, hail gameplay and physics. Doesn't matter if it's not realistic as long as it looks plausible for a game and is fun and fluid

it looks lifeless tbh

Power of math.

I agree, the quality really isn't that far off from what we can see in some popular titles. NieR: Automata has super responsive controls, something I'm a huge fan of, and having that responsiveness and fluidity is more important to me now than having a more realistic movement system that drags more and sucks the fluidity out of the controls. Definitely going to try and implement some of the things he's talked about here. I've got a 3rd person game demo that I'm trying to do on my own, and implementing these principles would save soooo much time.

To be fair, often times what appears to be a simple, obvious solution is completely non-obvious until it is pointed out. EA would probably* not have spent tens of thousands of man-hours animating each movement of every character in Assassin's Creed (and don't ask me why AC keeps coming up in comparison to this video) if they had known they could get better results with a clever programming trick. There are certain realizations here that are pretty brilliant in their simplicity, and while I wouldn't say he's the only one who had such realizations, he's one of only a few. It's also worth noting that these tricks would have been completely unworkable in the Mario days - they require a certain amount of processing power to make them trivial operations that hasn't been around until relatively recently. *EA makes some pretty dumb decisions sometimes, so I can't just say they wouldn't go the brute force route even if they know there is a better way.

Only took em 9 years...

@@BiosElement A lone developer with limited funds.

I still find Overgrowth's movement to be one of the most satisfying I've ever played. It's just damn fun to run around and jump around in that world. It's not exactly a deep game though, and the jump-kick is infinite cheese, which kind of spoils it after a while. Still, the movement was an absolute blast.

the way this looks isn't realistic though. there is a cartoony nature to it which is not what you want when you wan realistic, viscual human like movmeent for osmething like assasins creed. This looks more like puppets flaing around, which works for this game, but it's foolish to think one method can fit all.

@@talanock that's the thing, you can adjust the params for those dampener and animation transition to make it more realistic, and i think thats why this tech is very interesting.

The first alphas came out in 2008, which already had pretty much exactly what you see here

@@LeeAndersonMusic Can confirm, I was there!

10 years (since the demo, NOT even the game) and this is still my favorite GDC

You and all game producers

Yes, I agree!

Yeah, I know little about animation, so was wondering if it boils down to making only the extreme poses (like standing pose and crouching pose), and interpolating in code, rather than creating the in-between poses manually, which would be the more traditional approach. Is that correct?

(Not an expert but) I believe that is correct! Especially since he's modelling the interpolation on springs (force, damping etc) you get some procedural ease-in and ease-out. I'm _also_ quite sure using material physics lumps on secondary motion. And so on and so forth. It really is fascinating--the more you think about it, the more ways you can optimise towards an efficient animation workflow (even if you go back in later with high fidelity animations during polish).

@ruzan Yeah I believe so. In the Q&A he gave example about making key-frames for holding large ball, small ball and interpolating between them ( 25:35 ).

Think of it In this way, I use blender and will explain it with this software but the idea is the same regardless of the software: Do your animation as you would in Blender/Maya/etc, If you're doing a run cycle...: you most probably have a few major poses, not just two. YOU CAN STILL DO THIS!! What he did was a very simplified illustration of the process, but ultimately he is just interpolating KEY POSES directly in his GAME ENGINE instead of doing it in Blender. This way he does not have to bake the information into a 250/X - frames animation, and then read all of that information in the Game Engine. He can simply use the KEY POSES to "recalculate" the interpolations necessary for the whole animation. Your 3D Animation software does this already, but it is more powerful if you do so directly on the Game Engine. When you animate in your software you define key frames which determine a specific pose of the skeleton in time. Whatever you don't manually "specify" gets "imagined" by the software and recreated by interpolating the positions of EVERY vertex on your mesh from one point in time to another. If you export your KEY POSES only, and then complement this by Interpolating in between them IN the GAME ENGINE, then you can control HOW these interpolations happen in realtime. If I use unity as an example, when you import a 250 frames animation, each frame has a specific instruction set of how the skeleton is posed, meaning you have 250 different sets of instructions on your animation data that Unity will read when playing the animation. Today, computers are so fast that we can do the interpolation in realtime, so we could instead only import an animation that is 7-8 frames long instead, which only contains the KEY POSES of our animation. Then in unity, utilizing animation curves, you can CODE how these animations interpolate based on the animation curve you added. These animation curves can then be easily edited in realtime, or in the editor. Ultimately this results offering a lot more controls to the devs on what they can do with animations, and besides that, it is also easier for animators themselves to work with. This way, your animations are shorter (and occupy a substantial amount less of SPACE on the game data side), and more "adjustable".

Realistically you'd need to inhibit a character's motion range depending on the armor worn. Perhaps one could define a set of maximum angular ranges for each piece of armor and then have the animation somehow be procedurally limited to these constraints. An immediate problem I see here is that for instance very cumbersome armor will lead to shorter maximum step sizes, which in turn needs to slow the actual forward movement of the character. This breaks the rule of the animation not affecting the actual motion, but maybe a compromise can be found.

You could actually turn the inhibiting factor into a gameplay mechanic for more clumsy armour being perhaps more protective but less motile

With this you could solve that pretty easily. Just like he said with the spear, for each new item you do a new set of keyframes. Because there are an extremely small number of keyframes to make, you can customize animations to any in-game item very easily. The only issue I could see is if you allow complex combinations of items, because then you would have to procedurally generate keyframes for the whole body based on what is worn/held on each part of the body. For example: I am wearing chainmail pants, a steel chest plate, a giant pointy helmet, carrying a spear, and have rigid boots. This would require his system plus some sort of procedural priority system to choose parts of the different animation sets. The helmet will VERY seriously affect rolling animations while the boots will affect all animations, and the spear will have even more effects on rolling, jumping, and anything close to a wall. Very doable, but this changes from a few months for his sustem to almost a year, maybe more, for a procedural version

Either inhibit movement or make a good PRACTICAL armor design

yeah make most armor practical, and if there is an impractical one, it is a full set, so all motions are limited, like a power armor, it restrain you movements but increase the strenght a lot, and only makes sense to use full armor

but how does affect on the perfomance to do these calculations for multiple characters? are the differences huge enough to not be worthy?

​@@LuisCassih I am not an expert, or incredibly experienced, but what I do know is that modern computers are incredibly fast, and can process an INSANE amount of data. Interpolation and blending is fairly simple for a computer to do, as it is just simple math (adding/subtracting and multiplying/dividing). Keyframed animation still has an edge over procedural in terms of performance, but not by a lot. For the modern machine, procedural shouldn't be a problem. If you'd like a deeper dive into the subject, I found an article called "Comparing Traditional Key Frame Animation Approach and Hybrid Animation Approach of Humanoid Characters". It goes into performance about 22 pages in.

Brian Shannahan seriously. It's funny how touted the euphoria engine is for gta, yet this guy's falling animations are loads more convincing using the simplest of methods.

Sargas Evigmae How did it go?

Seems he's still rethinking.

@@Gurem I hope he has a rethinked life now.

Physics and mechanics in games have always inspired awe in me

MTRredux, IMO, not something to praise: you should save time to make as good a game as you can. This is not 97. It's like writing your own browser to make a website. I'm sorry to say, but Owergrowth, as a game, was not worth this amount of time in development. Yes, animation system is awesome in it's simplicity and system design and works for anthropomorphic rabbits. No one knows how that would look on a realistic human.

+Lynx Lynxov, I hear what you're saying, but that assertion depends on whether his goal was making a game, or making great technology as a source of personal fulfillment. Ars gratia artis, or art as a product for sale? I make virtual things on a computer, or real things in wood and metal, that I could have purchased, because what I really want is not always the result. Sometimes the real goal is the joy and learning of the craft process.

Markus Glanzer I'm not sure but it was one guy working probably less hours than a part time job over 15 years. At 20 hours a week that's 15,600 hours. Even if assassins creed was made with 100 people working full time for one year it come out to 208,000 hours. I can almost guarantee more people are involved for longer than a single year and a good portion will do overtime. But that's comparing the games in total. Knowing how many hours spent on the animation system for either game is kind of impossible.

Just a question,so am i able to do the same in unity?

EXACTLLY