2017 Animation Bootcamp: Tricks of the Trade

[Music] all right let's let's get this started so right after this talk it's just gonna steamroll right into steamroll like that plug in to Julio's part two but before that tricks of the trade last year tricks of the trade was the number one rated talk of the first two days of the boot camps um it's everything it's it was great it was amazing Alex did a great job setting it up the baton was passed this year to Christian and he assembled a new group of people to just rapid-fire drop a ton of knowledge and process into your brain so I'm gonna get out of the way and let them do what they do give it up for the tricks of the trade okay all right are you ready okay I've won welcome to the second edition of tricks of the trade my name's

Christian John G and I'm an animation director for Ubisoft and I'm gonna be your host today I've been lucky enough to work on various different Studios out on games such as the Assassin's Creed Splinter Cell and watchdogs too but basically I love gameplay animation which is why we're all here right I haven't got time for that so that's apparently is an amazing diverse panel of industry talent with over 70 years of combined animation experience they're still hungry to learn and eager to share their tips and tricks with you but first a quick thank you you all clearly appreciated that the fantastic content and last year's tricks of the trade making it the number one animation talk at GDC but why well it has its full of bite-sized pieces of animation gold tips from industry veterans that you could take and immediately apply to your work as soon as you leave this hall and of course the presenters were pretty great as well but of course and then so so this year we're returning with even more in 30 minutes of knowledge sharing that will hopefully help you level up your animation and

industry skill okay the only way we're going to develop as an industry is if we share and we pay it forward these tips have helped us speed up our daily workflow we've learned from our peers and so in the interest of sharing we hope this encourages you to share with us too so the format is pretty simple six panelists three tips each five minutes apiece which means we're going to be going pretty fast so don't worry about taking notes everything's gonna be on the GTC volt so buckle up and enjoy first up is going to be mario the trade let's get started oh my god okay I'm back I'm up here again so hi I'm Muriel I'm lead animator and art director for lab zero games we made a game called skull girls and now we're making a game called invisible my experience in game

animation has been entirely in 2d but I think my tips today can help all kinds of animators hopefully so since we're starting this might be an obvious one but we could start with something basic this is a question I've gotten before so I figure we can kind of cover it so when I start animating a new game character the first thing I start with isn't a run and attack or a jump or anything like that it's the idle pose this is the root of all your animations this is where they start and end what should your idle pose look like though you can use the opportunity to get some personality in there but also you should keep in mind how the idle will connect up the rest of the characters animations for example for our archers if a here we needed to make sure his moves matched the way he was holding the bow and arrow in his idle a lot of the concepts had him switching hands so we needed to make sure they all lined up okay also important is to remember not just the idle animation itself but the transition to and from your idols game animations

are actually interrupting each other all the time because different things are happening so making sure that you return to that same base is going to help your animation feel more seamless as they turn to the transition and especially in 2d it's important to remember that the Idol itself is also a motion I think what can end up happening if you don't pay attention is that you treat the idol as a single pose and animate as if you're easing into that single pose but since the idol itself is emotion you need to treat the start and ends of all the animations of connecting it to it as a continuous motion so you need to be aware of where you're coming from and where you're going to as you animate moves stemming from the idle so tip number two at our studio we've gone from making a fighting game to a platforming RPG when and they're both like games viewed from the side that kind of looked the same so that means we can animate them the same right but actually a key thing changed between our two games how far away the camera

was in skullgirls our fighting game the characters are large on screen because they essentially are the entire game subtle touches came across in the animations because they were just so big and then we started to animate our second game indivisible which is a platforming RPG and we actually quickly realized that we couldn't approach it in exactly the same way we zoomed out the camera and a lot of the detail we had put into Skullgirls characters just became noise when viewed from the zoom in and visible so we had to simplify everything our animations our characters we just kind of had to relook at what we were doing subtle animations had to be exaggerated a lot more just so you could actually see them on the screen and this doesn't just apply to us what kind of game are you making are you viewing your character from the side the top-down is at first-person if you're working on something like League of Legends or Diablo or your animations are viewed from above you might not see expressions that you want to animate on the character you even need to approach your key poses differently because your

silhouette reads differently from the top if you're working on a first-person game and you can run right up to an NPC or a monster you might want to put facial animations or subtle idols in there to create better immersion in that world or alternatively how often are you even going to see the close-ups of the monsters you're destroying do you even need to see that detail if you're always shooting them from 500 feet away it all depends on what you're making and how you can get your animation to best serve how the player is going to be looking at it I went too far okay so try animating something as simple as turning around in place do you just instinctively know where your feet go and what they do do you know where your shoulders and hips are do you know where your heads looking are your eyes open or they closed if you know all this that's kind of amazing because I don't know so whenever you can you need to act things out you need to get up out of your chair I know it's hard and you need to act out

the motion you're trying to make it helps so much to really feel the motion you're trying to animate in your own body act out what you're trying to do and feel where you're putting your weight which is so so important in animation and you can also record yourself or your friends or take photos of poses like this stupid one of me here for example for this move in particular we had an idea of the poses we wanted to hit but figuring out how they connected was difficult and the solution was just to get up and try it ourselves like you see here it's things like this that maybe you could figure out if you just kind of sat at your desk and thought about it for a long time but even then I still don't think you'd arrive at a convincing a result you really need to feel and understand the subtleties of the motion you're trying to recreate on screen and to do that you have to get up out of your chair and just do it and that's it for me next we have Zack

sorry I have to make this slightly bigger because I'm going blind hello I'm Zach Lowry I'm a senior animator and designer at Bosque productions working on the competitive first-person shooter lawbreakers so I've been deemed the guy that's gonna talk about first-person tips and having me follow Matt beam today it's kind of cruel but I'm gonna do my best and probably echo some of the stuff that he talked about so before joining Bosque I was at volition for 10 years and I worked on the entirety of the Saints Row franchise and that was a third-person open-world game so for the last two years I've been working on the majority of first-person stuff and today I want to focus my tips on things that can help people transitioning from third person the first person because you definitely have to approach this from a different perspective no no that's alright it's yeah you get it

alright so third person animation setup we've all animated typical third-person setup the route drives the center of mass the weapon is constrained to the hand and the hand drives the weapon and third-person your animating character first and the weapon is secondary already you're animating the character first and the weapon is secondary okay so but when you set this up in first-person you get this interesting center of mass of the weapon is off-screen so if you're trying to do like you know subtle movements or bounces and things like that your center of centre of mass is off-screen so it throws off your rotations and you start having to I do a lot of counter animation to get it to rotate from the correct stand point so Matt kind of touched on some of this what you want to do and first-person is let the weapon drive so in a typical first-person setup

what I would recommend is the weapon as the character treat it that way it's what you're going to see on screen the hands set them to a weapon space so when I do a my animation I'm animating from the weapons center of mass I can set that up to be where I want it relative to the screen so that way when I start doing subtle motions like the one that I showed earlier you can see that my center of mass is on the screen and I'm not fighting this as I'm doing like settles and things like that so when I show these things side by side you can see that you get a nice nice rotation point from the screen and then you can play around with this and you can set up your weapons to to be however you want but you're not getting this odd rotation from the hand and you can your rotations start off clean and you know you don't have your hand angled at some weird thing and that's your starting pose it may seem like a dull moment but it's pretty pretty helpful so my second one I came across this quote from JK Rickey your job is an

animator is to present things clearly as possible for the audience so that nothing gets in the way of their entertainment it might look very visually interesting to have some fancy camera move while the character is dashing down a hallway towards impending doom but if it loses the audience the shot will be a failure so keep it simple and keep it clear it will still look cool as I read this it really hit home to me about first-person because as Matt pointed out we have staging which is something that's kind of rare in game animation we know where the camera is and we can act do our performance to that but we need to make sure that we're not making the audience sick or that we're not doing something that distracts from what's actually happening so keep it slept simple keep it clear you don't want that do not over design the action don't rush the key information and put do not put style ahead of readability it's something that's really difficult

to do when you first jump in the first person all you want to do is do the coolest thing possible and you've got this gun and you're going to spin it and flip it but if you're doing these complex actions and people can't follow what's happening you're going to lose out on the audience very quickly but what you would do want to do is simplify the action into what I call key beats use holds for understanding it typically takes four to six frames for the viewer to absorb information and then apply style to the beats and what I mean by style is your character or the weapons personality and then clarity is king it's the most important thing so this is an animation that did for this like kind of futuristic gunslinger guy and I think it kind of represents everything that I was talking about you can see the chamber opening when the guns energy core depletes the gun winds up to repower the core and then the chamber closes with a snap so what I did is I identified these key beats and then with

it being this idea of a futuristic gunslinger and like this techno revolver I applied the style to those beats so instead of the core just opening up and then going back in he spins it around flips it kind of snaps it back in and lastly layers or for details so this is a simple tip that our lead animator at Bosque share with me when I first came on board and I was just getting started in first person and honestly I think it applies to first person third person or just animation in general it's a simple no-brainer but sometimes you gloss over things like this but use your layers for the details and the details are what brings your animations to life so this is an example of a gun that I designed it worked with a concept artist same character he's got two guns and he's got to reload them independently because while this one's reloading he can shoot so he can't use both of his hands so we

had to design these guns to be reloaded without touching them with another hand so in this animation it's super simple the gun just lifts up it holds it there so that you can see that it's got a 3d printer that's printing a new ammo brick so that it can continue shooting I really dig this I think it's awesome but as far as animation goes it's really simple so what I do is I don't have as many layers as Matt but this is a super simplified example so what I use my base layer for is for my foundational movement on my overall timing the big motions and the base of the idea getting that across I go through that I get that in I put it in game because as you've probably heard today get it in game as soon as possible get it in games start getting feedback but going back to the animation is super simple but what brought that to life was the details how the gun shakes when it the ammo prints and I knew there was going to be a lot

of iteration on getting that to feel right does it need to feel heavy does it need to feel like it's rapidly printing I was going to play around with a lot so then that's my basic you know non exciting curves for my big motion but it gets the job done and then I come in with my detail layer and I add in these tiny curves that show you know how fast it shakes or whatever but what this allows me to do is keep my big curves big and my little curves little and then I can go in there and I can easily tweak like how it's shaking or rocking and things like that and I can play over around with the overall weight and feel of the gun without upsetting the timing and things like that so those are my three tips they're pretty pretty simple but when you start getting into first person if you've never done it before it can be really just overwhelming at times because as Matt was showing and and I learned very quickly we're stretching

and cheating things all over the place but as an animator that's working in third person like you you don't even know that you can do that and then when people are like oh no break the arms snap the elbow like do whatever you want like it becomes really freeing that I don't have to worry about you know two-thirds of the body yeah that's it and I'm gonna pass it off to young what's up guys all right so young though animation lead for Sparky pants not Spanky pants currently working on drop zone check it out great game all right first hit don't start your hit reacts from the idle I learned this when I was working on reckoning so we all know that vo game is different from film bill games is linear I'm sorry film is linear video game is more like a

jigsaw puzzle pieces all the animations have to fit within each other right they have to connect now hit reacts are a little unique that it reacts have to we need to feel satisfying and responsive right most new most new animators will automatically animate the hit react starting from idle to hit frame to recovery settle back into idle again that's how they they think they should animate it but when you do that the result is kind of sluggish it feels kind of slow right so as you can see here like the the animation right there I mean it it's not the fault of the attack that makes it feel slow because you look that the attack feels like it's not really making contact it feels a little sluggish right but we we start the animation for the attack later at the

recovery pose instantly the player will see like the attack visually that tapping is going to be sorry the react will be much bigger the pose is bigger if you start from the recovery pose so it's going to be a much clearer read quick and clear so as you can see their same attack but a bigger but but the reaction started later so it feels bigger it's the impact is huge the bigger you push that the reaction pose or the recovery pose the bigger the act I mean the bigger that tap will feel and I always tell people push this post as big as you can because like if you want it to be impactful make it big right that's tip number one you're welcome tip number two so this is a typical take that we see all animators do we have

anticipation we have an overshoot and then in action right perfectly normal the problem the problem is majority of time when you do this you don't know why the characters doing it right this is what we normally see in games character stands around player comes in and he just freaks out like just freaks out like you're right we know you don't know why he's freaking out so what I tell young animators is - now this all depends mainly for NPCs and it depends on like gameplay of course but if you add a decision pose a recognition pose a pose where basically tells tells of tells the viewer why he's reacting this way a teacher Maya Keller told me that acting is reaction is not action so how

your character reacts you something tells you who they are now this is very subtle and it depending on gameplay you can even you can spend more time in in view in the decision post give it more character this is where you want to add personality and subtext to your character before the anticipation people always ask me where do I wear how do I give it more personality character you do before the anticipation you do before he actually does something all right oh sorry you're welcome tip number three use your hand as reference now I learned this the hard way when you get a weird crazy creature and you spend all this time trying to find the perfect reference you're like I need to find an animal with 20 tentacles of large mouth eight horns it's like can't find that it just doesn't exist and if you guys seem that runaway so so use

your hands reference and how you want to use your hands reference is basically you want to figure out the center of gravity you want to figure out the weight you want to figure out how it's gonna be moving how the weight is being pushed pulled how the weight is gonna shift how its gonna settle once you figure that out as animators the body mechanics just follows right because that's them that's the core of animation if we figure out the timing and spacing we can figure out the rest and I use my hands like what just to block things out a lot just so you just like get it out of there so figure that out quick and then I can just you know block block out the animation all right this is this isn't it this is an image and get four four four four drops down and I couldn't find restaurant reference for this guy so yeah and yes those hands are mine

you're welcome I'm gonna hand it off to to John alright I'm gonna try to go pretty quickly here still bear with me my name is John Paul Ryan Miller I am the lead cinematics animator at Vicarious Visions currently working on insane trilogy and oh thanks and in destiny so my first tip is a technique I learned from a supervisor of mine at Rhythm & Hues studios Tim pixon and it's called swing sets so I'm gonna go to and try to do a condensed version of this process here so bear with me if you have any questions about it hit me up later this was a traditional technique that they used in television shows back in the day where they had a limited number of mouth shapes basic set of twelve shapes here helps you quickly create organic lip-sync without having

to do a ton of cleanup at the end you can use more or less than twelve but the basic idea is to start with twelve it's important to note here that these are not phonemes so they're not individual shapes that are crafted and then plugged in these shapes are built together so they move in and out of each other organically they feel like they're swing from one shape to the next and with many games having not having blend shapes and a ton of bones in the face this process once it's set up can help save a ton of time and also keep consistency among your animation team so if you if you look at it the flow of the mouth from the M to the you are follows the natural arc of the jaw and as the the mouth opens the jaw goes back in down and back and as it closes it goes up and in but now's not the time to get cocky but now it's not the time to get cocky but now's not the time to get cocky so the basic idea here is the list of your dialogue find out where your swing set shapes will be talking when writing it down you

know and looking at my chart those are the shape mouths that I came up with you okay but now's not the time and those can vary as well now and combine my T and L but again this is a great starting point time to get but now so now using my pre-built shapes go based off of the breakdown sheet that you guys just saw I take these in and I put them in for blocking it took me a little bit less than five minutes now this is obviously a smaller clip and you can start to see the value of this if you get a much larger larger dialogue clip to break this down just a little bit more here a quick example would be that I have the O in two and it goes directly into the TK and to get so I look at the chart and I and I say I need a breakdown in between here because these shapes are too far apart from each other so I have to have a breakdown to make that smooth transition I look at this way here and I'm not getting it here because the JA the way that the jaw is moving it's going in or up and in and so then I take a look over here this is

gonna get the drop in the jaw that I think that I want so I'm gonna go with the eye here but now's not the time to get cocky but now super simple but again you can come could see if this was a much larger dialogue and you're plopping in your shapes and how much the Vic it could actually help so wave and without I don't have the audio here another great thing about this technique here is that the curves tend to flow really nicely in your graph editor and potential issues are really easy to identify tip number two other great sorry here we go keep shape simple you can communicate wonders with just a few shapes many times characters will only have a few shapes that they move through Skinner here and ratatouille really only has three shapes that he moves through through especially when you pay attention to the corners of the mouth he works within those shapes as he talks throughout the film simplify your shapes you don't want to constantly be moving to extremes with your lip sync it should be motivated by an accent or by

an expression change and this is a great example here with the woman even though you can't hear her she stays in a certain range and it's not until she accents that her mouth actually goes outside of that range the corners of the mouth are the first place that I usually can see it so if you move through too many shapes and constantly go in and out it'll look too busy and over complicated so think of it like you do your performance you want a rhythm and a flow to your performance and your lip-sync is just one layer of that performance to treat it like that track the arcs of the mouth this example from Leica here as a really great flow to the corners of the mouth as they go in prototype here and it adds a great level of appeal to your lip-sync and last tip is change the shape of your blinks on its way up to help it feel a little bit more fleshed out this is a blank with the lids very linear closed and open you can see here on the way down and up very linear with just a small adjustment lots of times I

start with the center of the lid and I drag that just a little bit you can play with that basically the size your character they with wider obviously eyes or narrower eyes you may have to increase that drag a little bit here you can see it with just that subtle change it gives the eye region a bit more fleshed out feeling it can create a peel effect like you do with your lip sync it's a great thing to think about and polish and obviously you're seeing this very close up so as your characters get a bit farther away from camera it can start to look better on screen and next up is Elly [Music] hi my name is Sal Medina Soria and I'm lead animator on or the dog be making games since 2001 so my first tip is about how to make more efficient be more efficient with the buggin and problem solving animations in the game so programmers are often really busy people so before coming to them with a problem we should make sure we have checked that nothing is obviously wrong with their

animations check that your frame ranges are correct then you're using the right skeleton and then the Maya file exists all the obvious things that could be wrong in your animation pipeline so once you tell your your assets would you go and look for help not yet so don't present problems offer solutions is often more time consuming of an present in a problem within no solution but to offer solutions you need to understand how things work so here are just a few things you can do to narrow problems now and know what is getting exporting it to the game not always what you see in my as what you export so my studios use proxy rigs that try the skeleton that gets into the game sometimes you don't see these by default so make sure you take this skeleton game bro align root ground not try actory magic box it can have many names but there is always a node that drives the character it's like its parent is usually used to adjust character to the

ground drive collision blends animation in this node is really important and it can be the main cause of bugs avoid certain movements with it check it for a smooth rotations check how many rotation yukkuri say the house so most places have worked on I have tried to find an automated solution but in my experience it's always better when his hand animated disable all procedural animation Grandage is weapon free like a physics by doing so step by step you can narrow the course of the problem and understand how these things work in top of your animations other things you can do is disable lower the compression and detach the camera my second tip is about layer animations games use layer animations for a lot of features like heat reactions usually design requests these kind of animations because there are no men to interrupt anime locomotion these animations are no easiest to make pretty

but I think we should push the use of these animations to help a storytelling and character development parcel and additives are a great way of bringing character to life you can modify a whole move set with just an additive and transmit the feelings of the character at that particular time you can also give characters their own actions something they're interesting they would do another great use of passions and additives is to integrate characters with environment like rain vegetation touching the environment and finally another thing you can use layer animations for is contextual outfit animations here you can see an example if the fight sequence weave and without Jesus you want to hear it say Nathan Drake raised some madman and my last tip is real-time physics considering used to use time real-time physics in top of

your animations were never suitable use it as a way of enhance your animations and not to replace it physics give a realistic film to the animations when they are set up right it allows for overlapping and secondary motion when animations have to be interrupted it also provides a layer of realism animators should be involved when setting this physics up to make sure our animations look the best and if you want to know more about these technical Mac talk on Thursday I've got to go really quick hot mic okay so my first tip is to think I learned from my first animation director in Montreal comfort I look for this when reviewing my analyzers work it isn't about how comfortable the chair is or if you need a hug it's the understanding of body mechanics and readability so there we go dynamic poses can also be comfortable but it is understanding the limits of a

limb and that everything is connected that determine how far it can be pushed what is driving the intention and the purpose of the movement are you crouching reaching reaching for something or is it just the reaction unfortunately this is sonic has gotten a little lost and many animation reels I've seen so unless we had tons of constraints on our rigs to automate this which can remove control our rigs will allow this to happen but be careful of extensive extensive handle dragging to get bones into position also often I see animations that have that you can tell have being animated exclusively this way break down your thought process and I make through the bones moving through the chain thinking of what is driving the action if you are reaching for something drive the joints towards the object don't just pull them use connecting bones such as the shoulder and also be careful of isolating movements both of these poses get the head to the desired position but the one on the right feels much more natural now the reason for this is a comfortable pose will dissipate the position through multiple bones even down to the arms and the hips providing balance a good sense of weight

distribution and balance will help bring a subtle quality that helps make your animation feel much more believable notice a slight lean before the first step and the subtle weight shift from backs are from back front the front foot before the push check out the slight rotation on the hips and the transfer of way over to the right foot that provides the the power to continue the push when the hips move down the head and shoulders remain stable remember everything is connected so understanding these mechanics allows you to break these rules when something extra is needed such as hyperextending joints at a point of impact but you should only use this for brief periods of time this is backed up by amy robach Jones's tip from last year's trick stalk so go check it out so gameplay animation also needs to be readable as the action is supposed to be this applies when manipulating mocap just as much as keyframing the timing on these animations is almost identical but the animation on the right benefits from an animator pushing almost every aspect whilst maintaining the integrity of the motion for example

clear lines of action on attacks the left arm through the shoulders to the right hand highlights the location of where the hit will land combine this with a more aggressive yank back instead of right enhancing the pose which adds more emphasis the key areas of the move finally improve contacts make it making them move much more dynamic and readable proving that even with great mocap can be vastly improved by a good animator so my second tip is use slow motion now not just because everything looks cool in slow motion it also has its practical uses I learned this when working on trailers for Assassin's Creed the team wanted to capture everything in super slow motion but it highlighted any tiny errors in the animation which might usually be covered at that point in my career I found it hard to see smaller issues during general playback so scrubbing back and forth would highlight some of these errors but wouldn't give a true representation of what it would look like in the trailers so I started playing animation back at 1/4 speed to

emphasize the issues and it actually makes it easier to fix allowing me to spin round and see everything much much clearer so for extra clarity I'd turn on frames and ticks yeah I used 3ds max which let you scrub areas in super slow motion I'd use this to highlight a points on my team that was hard to see in real-time maybe the arc of a jump looks off the weight shift may be too aggressive play your animation in super slow motion and you'll be surprised at what you actually see but be careful of extensive timing changes this is a pass I will do more towards polish stage so my third and final tip is how does it feel gameplay animation is not just about looking good I firmly believe that an animators job is only half done when you export an animation working gameplay is really about the animation you're working on more often not it's about the animation before and after just these are just as important giving much more context to the current move when an hour when with each animation ask yourself these questions how will it be

by the player does it read well does it look and feel good when interacting with it does the look match the purpose should I take control away from the player if so when do I get it back when can interrupt the animation and does it feel right and what is the most common animation before and after this one is it worth creating a custom transition this will vastly improve how your animation feels block it out export it and get it how you think it will work in the game play it play it again give the control to someone else watch how they play it always ask how does it feel make them make adjustments reexpose test adjust and repeat this applies to any animation or system you can expect the player to interact with understand you'll get what your game designers actually want talk to them gameplay animation is a collaborative process find your natural rhythm and flow and your game will feel much better for it and as many of us said before get it in

that game so that's tricks of the trade yeah wait I know we've gone I know I know I know we've gone super over but we have more awesomeness and I'm gonna go really quick okay so we're just gonna do a speed round we're gonna just give you a bunch of tips this is my channel Gwen talked about it before it will give you loads of kind of animation goodness and everything there so if you want more information go check that out also Pinterest is awesome so the great thing about Pinterest this came from Darren Randall and animated mine in Toronto and he uses this kind of inspiration and and if he's trying to look to find something to do and it's just a gold mine of reference anyway so I'm gonna pass over

to JP mm crash [Music] it's crashed the music's playing but it's crashed so I think they're kicking us out that's fine anyway that's tricks of the trade thank you very much [Applause] you you