JUMPSHIP Blog

Hello again, Chris here.  

So last week we talked about character creation, inspirations and readability.  This week I’d like to go a little deeper into the technical side of character performance and what we’re aiming for.

In the early days I went for the traditional heavy asset approach.  It gave me specific results quickly but it didn’t allow for flexibility down the line.  Years of research later, GDC talks like Alexander Bereznyak’s “Procedural Pose Animation” and Blizzard’s Jesse Davis’ “The Animation Pipeline of Overwatch“, to name a couple, really enlightened me.

Last Guardian was a strong source of inspiration.  A heady mix of what looked like physics joints, IK constraints and gorgeous keyframe anim.   I became obsessed with the prospect of not just having smooth and responsive physicality but of ever changing emotional states layered on top.

Above is a rough test of the sum total of about 2 core animations worth of work, with a few pose tweak frames.  The task - complete control of the flashlight whilst scaring John and no animation state changes.

The first aspect is switching our attention from environmental focus to player intent focus, in this case pointing the torch with my right stick.  This is a simple IK weighting transfer of look direction and arm aim.  All the head and partial chest movement is IK driven and separated (inspired by James Benson’s GDC Animation Bootcamp Tips)

Layered on top of that is our emotional states.  These are just synced layers we surge with suitable curves for the performance, coupled with more rapid IK head movement and a wider range of randomised look positions.  I also added an IK right hand grab of the torch once we reached peak frightened.

The end result requires polish but it’s reactive and varied every time, something that fills my mind with exciting potential.  What if we could play a character who wears the emotional baggage you have accumulated playing as them?

Looking back on old animation cycles I now find myself in a frenzy over how much we could add with elegant technical solutions to convey internal emotion, history and subtext.

Hi guys, Chris Olsen, project Director on Somerville.  I thought I’d drop a little bit more info about the inner workings, so I thought no better a start than character.  It was always my intention that character performance be a pillar of the game no matter the camera distance and for this as a baseline we needed readable silhouettes. 

Some great early concepts from Gareth Davies.  Carving out as much negative space as possible coupled with costume accents for joints to bring out readable body dynamics.

When I first started this project years ago Eric Chahi/Delphine Software’s “Another World” and “Flashback” represented the perfect character  reference for me.

Readable, minimal. I could spot those sprites 20ft from my screen.  However as we progressed and my need to get the camera in close, grew - We knew we had to address our characters faces.

Our rigging/modelling/assets aficionado Mads took to iterating our models.  Tackling the challenge of appeal when the character isn’t a million miles away from the screen. 

Damon, our principle animator was in charge of establishing a core personality and anim style.  Mads built some handy features into the rig, including smear frame controls to distort our models.

Then I get to take all this lovely work and bring it into Unity to play with physics props, lighting and shaders.

We still have a ways to go on our cast but it’s in the right direction now and all those fancy things I briefed the crew we “needed” are now standard features.