Animating an Agent of Mayhem

I think we're gonna get started a couple of housekeeping notes first make sure to fill out all your evaluations not just for my talk but of course all the talks at the conference silence your phones so you're not blowing up at any point throughout the conference because I will throw things there a lot of water bottles up here wrap up room afterwards if anyone wants to keep talking is on the second and third floor I think on the other side and then everything will be up on the vault at some point as well so all right let's do it hi I'm Mike jungbluth I'm a lead animator at volition and specifically on agents of mayhem which I'm here to show you today some of you guys might be asking what is agents of mayhem well let me show you the way I personally like to think about it is GI Joe meets saints row it's an open-world game with vibrant

diverse characters an 80s cartoon aesthetic with the over-the-top irreverent tone of past volition games working on this game specifically has been a dream project for me because it requires the animation department to focus on the character development that integrates both narrative and game design and in what we're communicating and we have the ability to implement and drive game feel and fluidity of the characters and it's all wrapped up in this in this really great stylized aesthetic and tone which is for me like everything an animator could ask for and want in a project so we're gonna let this finish just so you can kind of see the rest of it it's almost done Hollywood doing his pew-pew and then I'm gonna break down the entire process we go from the name of the character how do we see that finalized in the game so like I said this was a dream for me but as with every dream there are going to be challenges that threaten to turn it into a terrible nightmare and for us the

scary part of our dream was the large cast of unique diverse playable characters to be set in an open world game and this specifically was because each character was going to need combat movement combat movement combat abilities interactions vehicles essentially all the things that you would do in an open-world game which means the million dollar question was how many characters do we want to play as and how many can we actually let you play us answering that question for animation meant defining and understanding a number of variables a good place for us to start answering those questions and understanding what the expectations were going to be for us were by looking at some other games that were out there at a time to see what they were doing but we really had no direct competitor to give us all of the answers wouldn't that been nice games with multiple hero characters are largely arena based focused on one primary mechanic which is often combat the fluidity and feel of multiple mechanics

and all this crazy traversal was fairly limited so there wasn't a whole lot to pull from there and open-world games are largely focused on one playable character with a really deep suite of moves that fluidly support all of the mechanics our directive was that we wanted to focus on the unique individual personalities of characters in a MOBA but with higher fidelity of movement to be competitive with other open world games so again we wanted all of the things but the one thing we did know was the team and the tools that we had at hand this is the largest animation team Volition's had on a single project with twice the number of animators and dedicated technical animators focused entirely on the editor side for the majority of the project specifically to technical animators in that case this was also the first project to use motion builder as all past games had used 3ds Max and biped so we certainly had the support of the studio but again a number of new variables to take into account

but before you can even sit down and start animating a character you need to know who they are and what we needed to know was how to understand both the design and narrative of each character so that we can communicate a fully-realized and cohesive performance and the way we like to make sure we're consistent and clear with these is that we established the character one sheets with these sheets we can quickly define a the core aspects of a character that we need to communicate with our animation we see the art the gameplay design the high-level narrative goals their personality and their motivation instead of having to revert refer to a big wall of text anytime we wanted to get to know a character or reacquaint ourselves with them this provided a consistent and clear reference point for everyone on the team so let's break down each portion of the one sheet to see what we consider necessary and important when animating an agent of mayhem so here we have fortune first up what you see on

the sheet and it's pretty straightforward the character's name where they're from their concept art and their signature weapons and equipment so fortune is from Rio de Janeiro she has her drone glory and she has two pistols next we use Maslow's hierarchy of needs this is used to quickly define the driving objective of the character and to find the core motivation as to why they're fighting Legion the color the level is then going to be used throughout the rest of the sheet to make sure the core objective is is carried throughout everything so fortune is all about esteem she's driven by her confidence and her achievement she doesn't really feel or need to worry about the the having to fight for things like family security or basical physiological needs below Maslow's hierarchy triangle is the agents favorite music fortunes favorite music is reggaeton and figuring this out what their favorite music is really became one of my favorite elements of the character see a big part of a performance is being able to maintain the emotional state of the character for

actors maintaining that emotional state throughout a shot or action can be measured in minutes for animators it's hours or days this is where knowing their favorite music becomes really important listening to their favorite genre or artists allows you to stay on their head space for longer amounts of time it can speak to and influence timing and personality choices and it helps to unlock additional depth to their character as you search out new artists and become more immersed in the culture of their music even if it's a genre of music you really just like as I initially did with reggaeton sticking with it actually can become a really important part of the animation where actual when you're working on the character with fortune now if I'm not listening to reggaeton as soon as I need to do something with her it just it just doesn't feel right anymore alright so next on the design on the the character one sheet is this middle part which is the character's gameplay pillars this is a kind of a chart Voltron that is meant to show how the core agent gameplay relates to the agents personality so let's start with

the ring on the outside of it this is specifically their ability ring which is broken into five sections and the top left is the agent special ability this is meant to be used multiple times throughout a battle here fortune fires off an AoE blast and in the top right ring is their mayhem ability this is meant to be used once every few battles for this fortune hazard rone create a death blossom stun blast the bottom three sections of the ring are the agents passive abilities now while these often don't require any specific animations it does speak to their play style and personality which is really really important for animators to keep in mind as those help to define the characters and the players in-game performance and play style throughout so knowing where we should lean into certain parts of the characters combat or movement suite is important ok so now looking at the big triangle middle at the very top of it is what we call the trait force and this itself is broken into four sections so we're gonna enhance it CSI style here amazing so

this is broken into four sections the triangle at the top is the characters must have defining characteristic this is their high level pitch fortune is a high-tech pirate that's who she is the triangle at the bottom left is the strength of the character either in personality or in gameplay that we want to make sure it's often highlighted and that we that we lean into fortune has a really carefree attitude that's important the triangle at the bottom right is potential pitfalls we can see the character falling into these are areas we really want to make sure that we're always kind of weary of is it could make the characters or unenjoyable or or too stereotypical we didn't want fortune to be too much of a pirate so no arse and a holy mates that are peg leg or anything like that the triangle in the middle is the character secret this is something we don't always overtly state to the player or in game at all or even that this character would tell another character in the game but it's something we use to help round out character and kind of give them depth when we're thinking about them and working on them so with fortune she's

really just doing all this for the money in tech we found that if it's a really serious character giving them kind of a silly secret helped to keep them a little balanced in her head and then vice versa if they were really silly going on something a little bit more serious alright so the next triangle is the agents unique traversal type fortune canary - that's important to know since we gotta animate it the triangle in the middle are the range triangle which signifies what ranged the agent and the character is best suited for their weapons and abilities fortune is a short-range character and at the bottom right is the combat triangle and that defines the playstyle and role of the agents abilities and weapons fall so this is with in regards to mayhem lethality and durability fortune lies between mayhem which is how much they should use and rely on their abilities and lethality which is how much damage they can output and then finally on the sheet we have our coordinate graphs and these represent the inherent personality and ability of the characters the way these work is that on each line in the

graph are two opposing sets of traits and then you plot the character on the graph where they fit so specifically on the left is the personality graph which from top to bottom has reserved too showy this describes how flamboyant or over-the-top an Asian is there are are they more willing to be the strong silent type or are they super boisterous and everything they do fortunes pretty damn showy from left to right we have lawful versus chaotic this describes how much an agent follows a sense of order are they more honorable or are they more reckless fortunes rather chaotic on the right is we have the ability graph and this is where at the top natural versus tech and this describes the agent and their inherent ability set are they naturally capable of doing everything that's going on or do they really need to primarily rely on their tech to be successful fortunes right in the middle of this meaning that she's is naturally capable and gifted as she is at using tech from left to right we have team player versus loner and this describes how well an agent gets

along with others are they the type that rallies around teammate or do they prefer to hang out on their own fortunes much more of a loner reflecting both a replacement on Maslow's hierarchy and your secret as well so once you know all that stepping back it means that you can get a really quick read on who fortune is very very quickly so what we're gonna do is we're gonna look at the other four agents that we've announced so far in the game as well as are gonna be showing up throughout this talk first up his heart attack we can see he's a social crass sailor from America that doesn't [ __ ] around he loves classic R&B and doesn't keep any secrets from anyone he can wall climb he has a short-range shotgun and is armed with 8l harpoon and explosive depth charges for his abilities he's pretty lawful only a little showy and a born natural along with being a team player next is Hollywood he's from Van Nuys California and he's the face of mayhem he has an automatic rifle that fires off grenades and lives for the glory and attention of others even if

it's negative he loves trashy radio pop music the animator working on him love that is on the lawful side of showy and is more of a born natural than tech person and his abilities and skills which includes air dashing and finally we have Rama who uses her bow to fight and secure homeland from India as from the scourge of Legion she uses different types of arrows she enjoys crunk music she's one of the most lawful and reserve members of mayhem and by that nature makes her more of a team player having her user tech and everything she can to it to sort of help out those who need it okay so once we had those and we were able to have our characters more defined pretty easily the other core part of the tone we really needed to understand to be able to communicate was the game's art style which is defined on a high level for the game as theatrical simplified and vibrant so our animation style needed to match them and what that specifically boiled down to for animation was the idea of the ordinary versus the extraordinary the ordinary

would be things like walking running standing turning that could just be sort of standard mocap polish we could get away with that the extraordinary were gonna be things like jumping and dashing and special abilities these were things that we knew we wanted to get a little bit more exaggerated with the style and what's key about this is that this approach allows style to be used in a non arbitrary way attaching more pushed animations to clearly define gameplay systems which is necessary because stylized animations just by their nature take more time than standard mocap polish so we needed to be smart and how and when we could embellish and that intentionality I believe is what helps to create a unified experience and quality bar across the project so with that in mind our first style pillar is simplified which we interpreted on animation as a limited 2d style matching our overall aesthetic that means the timing of extraordinary movements will be snappy faster through the motion with longer held poses conveying the key

moments of the movement or ability this means you know really super simple lines of action during quick movements sort of think of like smear poses unless as individual storytelling poses throughout the actions now when I say smear frames as reference we aren't using any literal smear frames or shader tricks like like a lot of places what we're doing is we're thinking about the poses like smear frames where we want to reduce the noise and complexity of the pose through those snappy transitions for example this is a front flip that was done early on that would show what it's like to be animated in more of a traditional style right on the way up you have the arms and legs offset as they rise leading into the spin and then unrolling naturally as she descends you know nothing wrong with it pretty straightforward but when thinking of the poses in a simpler more smear mindset on the way up we want the body to have the limbs brought in creating a cleaner singular line of action removing any of that complexity and noise that's going on same getting them into the ball at the apex it should it should happen a little bit quicker coming out of the

ball the character should instead of roll unrolling naturally they should snap into more of an iconic in air pose and then when they begin to stretch into the fall again the character becomes more of that singular clean line of action this is really the essence and intent of smears without having any tech that gives you smears in regards to theatrical by attaching our extraordinary actions to gameplay systems the exaggeration of abilities and personality moments will help to draw focus towards the theatricality of the character actually with fortune special ability how her guns create a large ball of energy really as an is isn't as important to us as making sure the action just fits her personality wildly launching it forward while jumping with a double bounce land makes it feel like it makes sense even if it makes absolutely no sense how that ball of energy is coming out of those pistols and then this leads up just naturally into a vibrant pillar and and this means that the personality of the pose is just as important or even sometimes more

important than the functionality of the pose instead of animating a traditional jump for instance which hits the proper mechanical poses along the way we like to think of the characters more like Spider Man his poses when jumping through the air say far less about the mechanics of a traditional jump and more about that character specifically being in the air by clearly defining ordinary versus extraordinary we hoped that we'll be able to strike both of the bold and balance that we're trying to get with the style without feeling at odds with the with the mocap and hit that vibrated pillar so with all that in mind jumping was pretty important to nail down early on and yeah to me I really feel like it's the definition of our extraordinary style and what we use to establish it first thing so this is a jump test I did really early on and pretty quickly to show how jumping in our game could look and feel a bit different than a traditional jump fortune was the first character I was gonna be working on and this model was one of our early test meshes we knew we wanted multiple jumps with air dashing

come on now keep playing you want to play with jumping with air dashing and and when everyone on the team responded to it it was like alright let's figure out how to break this down so the animators can match this and designers know what this would take to tweak in game so let's break down the very first jump and this actually ended up being really close to fortunes base jump in the final game again notice this simple line of action on that first stretched pose it's also worthwhile to note that she has zero anticipation on her jump when on unbuttoned impress as she begins to blend to the top of the arc she begins to hit her personality post her crossed legs at the apex of course are not mechanically true pose for a job but they do helped us start to speak to her more fun free willing nature remember we always want to be asking how does this character specifically look when they're in the air as she squashes at the top of her jump the core of the air pose is held and it's really the follow-through of her limbs that keep the momentum alive as fortune begins to

release into there her descent the legs drop first this helps to give a sensation of gravity pulling them down but still allows for the feel of the Hang Time to be believable because the upper body and the core strength of the character stays the same in the air notice also that the arm is sort of maintain a similar worldspace even as they begin to rotate up to help further sell that help pose and sense of hang time and then going into the fall proper we have the reduced body to the clear line of action we do have the arms bent to keep some semblance of control and strength within the character but to to help with the blend we found that if we left them straight up it would give some pretty ugly flashing interpolation as they tried to settle so it helped to bring them down a little which all this really just comes down to examining the spacing and timing is as the second important part beyond posing so for reference here's a pretty standard Muybridge jump twelve frames shows you how many frames make up each part of the action from rising hanging in the air and then and then starting

your descent and here are the twenty seven frames for fortunes jump in comparison and you can start to see some numbers there but better the numbers right is always just an image so what we're really getting at is that instead of a standard parabolic curve we want more of a plateau a faster up a longer hang time in a in a heavier drop and this timing helps to sell the style of having just an in air pose instead of the standard jump because posing means nothing if the physics of the world's team is the same and because of this we also get the benefit of bringing the jumps into style meaning that we can use the same for standing jump versus move jumps because mechanical function isn't important isn't what we're trying to convey here it's the personality of the character and because we're doing that it can function for both standing and jump and running so after implementing and tweaking this in game this is what a curve looks like for us the top one is the base curve that I just went through and the second is her double and triple jump as you can see the rise and hang

remained pretty consistent with that first test the only thing we really changed was the drop off we ease that a good bit as having such a harsh drop made gauging jump distances a little more punishing than we really wanted to have in the game and this is what it looks like in game here's her triple jump chain and because triple jumps are considered extraordinary it means that with each jump we can push the pose and personality further with each in the chain like you might do with an attack combo in a fighting game so it allows us to really kind of get more and more wild with it but how wild we can get goes back to the one sheet and how showy they are in their personality since fortune is more showy she's totally within her character to do flips and spins and all manners of flourishes and her movement and poses so if somebody comes up and says I think that's too crazy no no no we established she is already crazy it's fine alright so next key framing and style pretty straightforward but we knew we'd be using mocap as a base for a lot of the combat animation suite so we wanted to

know what it would take to take some mocap in and bring it into style and we started with her melee ability as the first place to do that so here's the raw mocap that we got from her actress Maggie McDonald it's a solid spin kick but of course we need to edit it to get it working in game so if we were gonna bring it into more of an ordinary style we're gonna of course speed it up about twice the speed of the raw mocap with attention being paid to you know some spacing and timing and here it is with a style pass we adjust the timing to shave off another seven frames but a lot of what this style is comes from the posing and timing before the point of contact so let's break that down specifically again like the jump we're gonna start with that stretch pose try and keep it super clean the height of the in air motion has been lifted overall to give it more of that hang time and anticipation to feel similar to the jump and that leg of course will just be starting to drag immediately the body

has largely hit that held in air pose it's important to the character even as that leg breaks that hip entirely not worrying about it and again the body is really maintaining that overall sense of pose while we're still letting that leg drag around so that it helps to read more clearly so when you watch it again what you can hopefully feel more than see is that attention spent in that in that initial lead up to it to make it feel more snappy and exciting overall so it was pretty much then at this point in the style conversation that well how far can we actually push these things beyond timing and spacing and poses those conversations started to happen and of course for animators that usually comes to squash and stretch right and so we needed to make sure we defined that before people started going too too crazy with it using motion builder and not custom rigs that inherently limited us to how much we could do but again with mocap being a large part of our movement suite it couldn't really be too

over-the-top so like our overall style we needed to be rather purposeful and non arbitrary and its use so here's fortunes - left there's some squash and stretch built into her spine but it's more to carry the energy of the motion through the spine than to make it feel super snappy or or over-the-top you know we really want you to sort of feel it more than see it and not how to instantly jump out at you it isn't even also meant to be used on everything - it needs to be brought into style only when you need to sort of keep that pose or energy alive it needs to serve the the core functionality of the style posing and timing are really what it are at the core this just this just supportive okay so we know more about the characters we know more about the style of the game we can now finally start to digging into what the overall quality of the animation is and start to find some more of those answers as to just how many characters we can support so one last

thing we really wanted to do before we got this was established two rules first we agreed that out of combat needed to have higher quality visuals versus in combat this was because the player character is really the focus of them out of combat you're watching the character as you're playing with them but during combat right you're watching the reticle that characters is in focus to that so we decided that was a pretty good balance to strike as to where to really spend our time and then second was that that would we want to start with on ground movement because that's really something that's pretty common in every game and has a lot of a lot of expectations in regards to fluidity and responsiveness that we knew we needed to be able to deliver so what we did was we started with the bare minimum of just a idle jog and blends to see how terrible it would look and of course it it looks pretty terrible but it allowed us to identify the exact areas that annoyed us the most that we really wanted to target and what that ended up leading to was four

directional jog starts to 180 jog turns walk jog and sprint stops we also have additive leans additive head looks additive torso looks establishing a standard like this allowed us to define gameplay metrics and mark up on the assets for Universal responsiveness to ensure taint turn rates at different parts of the animation could be leveraged by all characters so for jog starts every character needs to have turned by frame ten to twelve and they need to be at full jog speed by frame eleven to thirteen no matter the character's size they needed to match this metric to match this system which means selling weight and speed is entirely aesthetic like hardtack here after animating fortune one of the smallest and most agile characters in the game hardtack was my second character which worked out really well because it allowed us to prove out that the metrics we defined with fortune could still work for characters of any size and what's really become one of my

favorite things on the project is that during internal and external play tests we usually always get some feedback from somebody that says yeah when I was running around the city I always just switch to Fortune because she was faster and more agile than hardtack even though under the hood they are 100% at the exact same metric no difference at all another example of meeting metrics but selling the weight through animation is jumping unlike fortunes based jump which has no squash at the beginning just that straight clear line of action for larger characters we do have about three frames of squash compression that happens at the beginning and what that does is that covers the the duration and the blend at the jump and it helps them to feel just a little bit heavier on that first button press they still hit the same height metric overall they have the same overall time and air but those three frames at the front again help to elicit that same feedback from playtesters that they do on grout foot on ground movement it well if I'm jumping I'm also going to switch to one of the more agile characters and again it doesn't matter they can get around the world with equal skill and ability

which really sort of led me to one of my favorite mindsets on the team which was let's solve it with Universal systems not tons of crazy unique assets if we can because with multiple player characters the number of unique assets we could support per suite was going to be limited so the more common Triple A approach of just throwing lots of animations into a unique suite for each system it just wasn't gonna be possible for us so the first big test of this was going to be out of combat Stan turns these are of course one of the deepest darkest holes you can try and fill with animations for the rest of your life slow turns fast turns upper body versus lower body keeping the feet locked down versus allowing straight to slight translation we just knew there was no way we could support a complex turning system for our characters so we didn't we in fact didn't make any animations for it at all what we did is we used walk stops and we just let the system handle the rest when you deflect the stick you're getting a couple frames of

the additive head and torso look as well as that blend into the jog start so the character has at least some facing of their body on stick deflection and if we author the walk stop to have some additional foot shuffles back into place where it does it helps to sell the momentum of the turn sure it's not gonna be as pretty as a turn system of course but it is free and it is responsive and as a general rule if there are a couple of ugly frames on input as long as the follow-through looks and feels good people are going to be ok with it so vehicle entries are of course another huge investment with animations once you take into account multiple vehicle types that you need entries from from different angles and different versions and if they already have drivers or maybe passengers inside what can be a giant suite and investment for even just one character across multiple characters would just be scope crushing so when realistic functionality for us becomes too much it's really time to lean into style and tone and for this

task specifically we had two animators Josh Behrens and Nick nibbling light the way for us teleporting and swapping characters is a core part of the gameplay and tech that mayhem uses so using that as a cheat for vehicle entries made sense Josh and prototype and implemented it but it was really with the addition of Hollywood giving those finger guns as he chooses to the camera that Nick added that extra bit of personality that really made the feature fully embrace the style and tone of the game at which point these have now sort of become more and more of signature animations for the characters as we kind of continue to blown up and show how they would cheese it up to the camera the other place that we couldn't afford to add additional assets was turn fidelity while running designers and world builders of course wanted more narrow areas to to move and controls needed to feel tight and responsive in those situations and of course they still needed to look good when you're running down in wide open Street so

instead of giving two entirely different Suites for different situations or additional transitions based on different stick deflections or speeds one of our senior animation programmers and a professional chicken Wrangler Isaac venire took a approach similar to out of combat versus in combat see when when you want responsive controls you usually near ledges or doors and you're more likely to be looking at where the position of the character is and not at the character itself but when you're in a wide-open space and you want the character to look more fluid and waiting so Isaac solution was to toggle a near versus wide mode dynamically in real time that adjusted the turn speeds based on very specific factors if there was going to be a wall nearby the character goes into near mode if you want to turn the corner to go into the door you would want it on if you have a large thumbstick deflection while moving it's going to turn on and when you start moving it again turns on and it stays on for about one or two seconds in each instance at which point it can switch back into

wide mode what this did was by adding it it meant moving down narrow corridors making tight turns and small adjustments to interact with an object were no longer an issue and since the turn speeds governing this were being controlled by switching between different blend trees in the animation graph it meant we could also then adjust our additive head and torso looks between each mode so what this means is in wide mode we have the body turn at a slower rate to look more weighty and fluid in game so what we do then is we lead with the head and then the torso and this gives the visual responsiveness to the player of their input of them you know looking as well as breaking up the overall order of operations on what's happening in the character so it doesn't just feel like you're turning a character on the stick essentially is what we established in that original quality video notice the the order of operations is the head and then the torso and then the full body turn while she runs but in near mode the body turns

at a faster pace to allow for that positional responsiveness we also wanted the head to turn fast to make sure that the character looks like they're aware of their quick directional heading but then what we do is we have the torso counter rotate to simulate some drag and again break up that order of operations that's necessary to do and at a certain point if running in a circle then we allow that torso to catch back up so the head and torso are again leading the body so this is what it looks like if I just turned it on even though I'm in a wide space it of course looks Twitterer than before and it's not as fluid or as appealing but again this is only triggered when the player cares about that need for twitch movement and fluidity and weight of the motion could actually get in the way and and you notice here as she runs that the thus in the circle that the torso drags behind the head in the body being to break up those order of operations is really key in making any of this stuff look in any way convincing or compelling without spending a crap ton of time on new assets another big animation assets Inc

is combat a movements even though we decided not to focus as much on combat movement as we were going to out of combat one area that we really wanted to address was those legs crashing through each other as they cross front to back moving angles but the traditional eight animations used before the studio / speed for this would really even add up across multiple characters enter at this point the mad genius of senior animator and cat lover Clay Matthews I don't know if he loves cats the previous approaches used at the studio was to capture the four cardinal directions and then some diagonals as shown here to cover the transition of the character changing from that forward running gate to the backwards peddling and you would put them all into a single blend tree and and blend them all smoothly as they thumb stick rolls around then in game there was AI ka Mauryan tation with the upper body used to to keep the character aiming at the straight ahead at the reticle and while this certainly works it still wasn't an ideal method for quality or even scope and of course not certainly

at the very least in any way competitive with other approaches at other Studios that use even more assets so with the mathieu method we can get away with only six animations which are all diagonals and requires no I K aiming to stay on target the way this works it is instead of capturing the four cardinal directions we capture back left or and front right as single assets and then the crossover angles of front and left front left and back right the three front moving animations are put in one blunt tree and the three back at another and then estate machine sits above those switching between the two as they're driven by stick deflection of angle there's a 10 degree overlap on those angles that switch back and the switch between the forward and the back so that if someone's hanging out on that angle you're not getting some ugly bounce right so we're going to look at those animations before we actually see what this looks like in games so that people have a better idea what we're doing so this is what we considered a forward animation which is as you can see 45 degrees forward right the gates pretty straightforward that characters is

aiming at the camera relative which is where the yellow arrow on the bottom represents here's what we would consider forward right which is 135 degrees to the right more than being a forward animation this is really just a sidestep where the left leg crosses in front of the right leg here is the back right which is again that hundred and thirty five degree angle but while also being a sidestep it's the right leg crossing in front of the left leg this time here's a pretty standard back run but this time it's at 135 degrees to the left and fairly straightforward backpedaling motion I promise even though it's not moving here's the back left which is another sidestep moving at 45 degrees left and here it's the left leg crossing the right and then the inverse for the forward left which is right foot crosses in front of left so here's what it looks like in game 6 animations for the jog and then we'd have six more for the walk and that gives us all of our combat movement for a character doing this

takes a little bit of time getting used to when directing the mocap and authoring the animations but once you wrap your head around it you get everything you need for even less assets than what we had before and it's entirely animation driven by the animation and the poses so no I Kate Eck is needed to keep them locked on that front reticle we do have it for up and down but again most the time it's right in that sweet spot and you're good to go okay so since we're already talking about graphs let's really just indulge our techy side completely beyond the evolving animation graph improvements and additions the big gamble for us on this project was going to be procedural as inspired by David Rosen's animation bootcamp talk a few years ago check it out on the vault if you haven't seen it before and what this meant specifically for us was I came on a Fire's as created by another ace animation programmer and dude look-alike Rob Rivka and it really all started with jump pants jumping is of course a big part of our game and

jump lands can account for nearly 40 animations per character jump play on Stan jump land walk jog sprint aiming jump lands in all directions across all speeds for what is largely a functional animation it can be a giant time sync looking around some games might just play the jump land stand while moving to get the compression in the land and just blend out a bit sooner but that still wasn't going to meet with our overall visual quality needs by saying out of combat was what needed to look the best so we decided to try our hand at procedural jump lands so here's a jump land in our game when you're standing still with a procedural everything that the body and head are doing on the land is in fact procedural we do animate the arms and they're exported as override animations but under the hood this is just the default idle animation that you're seeing with arms only playing and here's that same jump land while you're moving it uses the same arms override animation but with an earlier blend out but other than that this is just the run animation that you're seeing when they land and this overall saved us about 30

animations per character not to mention it maintains full player control and velocity of the character while you're landing which of course design and in us game feel nuts just absolutely love so how does this work well I'm not robbed I can't speak to the code underneath but I can show what he exposed to us and how to adjust the knobs and dials so that we can manipulate what it does it starts with defining a set of curves or one curve specifically and these are created in MotionBuilder for the purpose of jump lands we have ones defining how heavy we want that land to feel the curve will drive what the bones will ultimately do so in the light land at the top the large value followed by a smaller value sort of represents a bit of a double bounce for the heavy land there's a large value that holds for a bit and then settles back without much of that double bounce and this gives a land that holds a bit before rising up then what we do is we set a control parameter that we want to fire off in this case it's

going to be a pool like round bowl equals true the function that I'm setting there is the motion builder file containing those previous curves and then the function float track is the curve itself and then you can see here we can adjust some global values for it that are going to be the length and output scale of the curve next is where we start adding in the specific operations on each bone first we'll set the axis that we want to modify the bone on then the bone name as you can see there the hips next up we can set a delay so that they don't all happen at the same time again we can now set on a specific bone operation the length and output scale and then the offset and the offset can be in translation scale or rotation we can also set the space as you see here which is a model which is tipos or bone which is whatever pose they're in at the time so instead of just walking through all this stuff let's actually just make one so this is what a jump looks like without any modifier on

it like you see it's just a stand with those Wiggly arms going on nothing too great feeling let's add that wide translation down on the hips right on impact and you can see already alright we're getting that curve as defined by the land heavy then we can add some rotation forward and X on the spine with a delay set in there to happen later than the transition so we can break up that order of operations again that's really important having these live update is really a must as there's going to be a lot of iteration that needs to happen and being able to quickly compare and edit is is really what's going to be key and making this worthwhile and about 15 operations later we arrived at our jump plans obviously creating these still takes some time and iteration to get it right so the really big way that we win with these is that once we have a heavy and medium and light done we can just add that to any character and their jump plans are complete we just author some of that Wiggly arms which of course takes hardly any time at all and character is jumping and landing and good to go right out of the box the only

time that we don't use that is during long fall lands there's no fall damage for agents and they're gonna be locked in place for a bit when they land so that means it's a perfect time to add personality to the character so for Hollywood who by his very namesake strikes a three-point landing because how do you land in a Hollywood movie three-point landing I swear he's the only one that we do that was it was at this point what sorry missed an important part all right it was at this point then that Rob said wait I'm not done I can do more he made it made it than when you toggle sprint when jogging a modifier plays that compresses that character a bit on on button press to give that feeling of pushing off and exerting some force into speeding up since this is layered as procedural on top of the sprint that's blended in again it's not going to change the velocity or give you a hitch or anything like that it just makes it feel fluid while still having that

weight of like yeah I kicked into I kicked in the sprint at which point then I fell madly love with modifiers and they quickly became the Franks red hot sauce of animation tech first we added it to the out of combat to combat transitions that Blenda aim is only a couple of frames so the modifier gives us a nice bit of follow-through an overlap on the character without delaying the combat responsiveness of going directly into their aim suite we contrast this with those bespoke animations we make when transitioning out of combat and again what this does is it matches our overall decision to focus on out of combat animation showing how they transition from combat to out of combat has sort of become a fun little way of adding just that little bit of personality to draw the attention and focus back onto the character after combat then we use them as combat move starts and stops we have four cardinal starts and a single stop since again combat movement quickly just ramps up to desired speed of the character what this does is this gives

us a bit of a push off like that jog the sprint transition does and to settle like the out of combat to combat transition and then what's great about this is this is just these five modifiers are shared across every character everyone has it we don't have to make unique ones for them we could if we wanted to but again combat isn't the focus where we spend a lot of time weapon fires have also become a great place to use these and because as the library grows we can just add these two characters or quickly dupe one and edit it to get the unique fire per character what's also great about these is that they're easy to adjust as the shots fire speeds are iterated on by design so instead of having to go back in and adjust in the animation we can just play with that global output scale or or anything like that and now weapon fires are good to go this also gives us additive hit reactions which you can see here compared to the larger hit reactions to actually do interrupt them like there and by the nature of the

modifiers being procedural it means they can work while the character is standing still moving crouching mantling jumping whatever it doesn't matter what state they're in they're still going to play the hit reaction and of course then we can also use these on the player without interrupting the player control then we've got the ability to scale bones with the modifiers so I added some squash and stretch to the agents when they swap out you can see it easiest on hardtack where you kind of brood which was which was pretty fun and again that way swapping no longer required in animation so as you're running through swap to the character the next one comes in fluid responsive we're not interrupting anything at which point then we can get really silly and just add procedural squash and stretch to anything in the game that has a rig because why the hell not okay so finally the the last big hurdle that we needed to solve was facial animation the tech solutions and expectations that are

out there with facial are of course incredible and while we definitely wanted higher quality animation than previous games at the studio investing in facial capture or lots of custom hand keying animations just wasn't gonna work on so many characters so again it seemed here like line leaning into style was going to be what made the most sense what this meant specifically was focusing on strong emotive personality expressions like this iconic glen keane expression she created for tangled we would try to hit poses like those as much as we could and then just sort of animate with within those specifically what we would then do is this meant expression changes are what really just take the most amount of time to sell right on a physicality and emotional level those those hard and iterative so we just didn't have the bandwidth or as much as we might have the desire for it not not necessarily the need so it was best to just sort of make a scrunchy face like in the top second left picture there to sell that contrast of changing from one emotion to another and this was

great because it also keeps it consistent with our extraordinary style of the strong personality poses carried by some of a more clean smear mentality between them we were also cool with the fact that you know procedural Mouse would be okay because people can deal with that really it's it's the dead eyes and expressions that are gonna make people go that character doesn't doesn't feel right if we can make sure that the eyes feel alive the expression feels alive then we'll be okay with procedural and most people probably will be too so what this did was it meant we were gonna lean into the seven universal emotions this is anger disgust fear happiness sadness surprise and contempt every human in the world has these things and while each expression has very specific traits that you need for those to be able to read by everyone everyone sort of has their own unique version and take on it so this is what we did for each

character as well and much like defining their music figuring out taking the time to really figure out which actors or characters parallel our characters own personalities meant we had another really great quick touchstone for finding and communicating performances when when working together on the team these expressions along with the annasophia seems were all outsourced to animators with a past working in film the reference expression picture is what we gave them as their initial direction and what they gave us back were these solid building blocks that we were able to use by the rest of the team that were handcrafted essentially animation driven blend shapes as demo here by a tool written by our animation tech lead evan cox and with these what we can do is we can bring also the anna soft generated lip-sync animation in to get first past lip-sync for anything that requires so very quickly we can start to add facial animation so outside of a few specific animations shown here which are idle fidgets emotes mayhem ability in front

vehicle entry where the player can you know easily move around and look and want to see that the face is matching the motion everything else is authored with just no face and we let a default expression play underneath so that when you're running and jumping and all of that good stuff what you're seeing is that default expression under there which meant it became really important and we created an eighth pose which you can see here as demoed by our lead bad guy dr. Babylon at the end the personality pose and this would be the one that lives underneath it could be separate from the normal expressions or even a variation of the expressions it was also then at this point that we decided well if we're already making some changes to it it would be great if we could break up the sliders to have the full expression eyes only and mouths only and this was using Scott McCloud's approach to facial expressions as sort of inspiration and that being able to mix and match the eyes and mouths of different expressions and even vies Eames would mean that we could quickly create new combined expressions

to give extra depth and variety to the characters pretty quickly so with Fortune getting her to reach her full Rihanna potential it took nearly no time at all with those static expressions now crafted and implemented in the tool it seemed like being able to leverage them software side was only really going to be half a measure we would want to maybe see some of these expressions in life in game so we had our facial outsourcing gurus give us a single living expression to keep the face alive for each character again having them focus on it meant it it would meet a consistent higher quality than if we tried to rush it internally because balanced against gameplay needs this just wasn't as important then what we can do is we can copy multiple takes of that animation in MotionBuilder and drop each one of their unique expressions on a layer over it and now we have all of those eight

expressions alive and at a fairly consistent quality level it's at that point that we have a system to call all of those expressions in the game is the agent going to be happy to pick up an object to play their happy expression are they angry that Legion is around play that angry expression or did they just witness something weird drop that disgusted expression on them figure even when they're at low health right facial animation really I feel like is something where it's the definition of solving something with with a system and style and then leveraging that in as many places as possible across the game alright so after defining the characters the style the quality and tech were finally able at that point to extrapolate just how many of these damn characters can we make what we did is we ended up with just shy of 100 animations per player character and this is all of them copied from character

cell duck because I know everyone in here loves to animate in Excel sometimes don't why specifically something that we tracked and defined here is which assets can be shared from one character to another and this is managed by having all of our character animation sets live within a hierarchy so as long as one character is complete if everyone else is underneath them every character will inherit those animations allowing design to start testing that character right away and then we can just plug and play in animations as needed so with weapon holds characters that are large male underslung cool you want another large male underslung you've got complete access to one we'll just start plugging and stuff as it's necessary we also call out here which things will be animated internally versus externally a lot of those ordinary classified movements are and can be outsourced including jog starts and turns since the mocap really gives us a solid base and direction and our metrics are so well defined and precise communicating our needs to external Studios is relatively straightforward as well as using the

one-sheets to say and this is their personality on top of it sure we still have to do a final polish pass on all of those being implemented but what it does is it helps to make time for us to focus early on on nailing those extraordinary personality driven animations while still getting some some runway laid for the rest of their suite so after leveraging style sharing outsourcing in tech 100% unique characters are estimated to take about 10 weeks internally to create and implement all animations shared weapons holds can save us five weeks three weeks of polished and iteration are then added to each character so that we can react to any does needed design changes or iterations or play test feedback and this is how many characters we have in total beyond the 12 playable characters the four that we've shown today and the remaining silhouettes that you can see we have 10 enemy troopers seven unique NPC and multiple bosses and I cannot stress important enough how great it's been to have this diversity of all these characters on the team by us being able

to leverage a lot of these things bringing the characters and the animation process to life on this game has required for me the perfect mix of art design and tech we really speaks to the heart of game animation as I see him taking the time to fully define the characters style quality and tech upfront has allowed us to fully realize what I saw in my head when I started on the game and moving forward it's given us an amazing foundation to build upon I hope you've all been inspired by our techniques and I can't wait for everyone to not only see more of the characters that we've created but actually get to play it when we release the game later this year I personally could not be prouder of what our animation team and our team has accomplished with everything that we've created here speaking of which if you'd like to hear more about the art style on agents of mayhem there are two more talks today in West Room Hall 2002 at 2 o'clock we have senior VFX artist

Brianna Lindsey should be speaking about how VFX approaches the art style of the game and at 3:30 we have principal artist James Taylor who will be speaking about physically-based material rendering in a stylized game thank you all for listening we've got about 6 minutes for questions if anyone has going once going twice yeah go ahead you can just Mike's in the middle if anyone wants to jump up I saw hands all right well if you up go ahead how many unique blend trees do you have or just for locomotion oh man so what we do is we've got essentially one monster graph that we're using for all the characters and we then layer in between between all of them it's gotten pretty

beefy what started on early with every animator being able to just jump in and like hey I need this specific thing for this character so let me add a new node and the unique transition started to break things this stuff got really interconnected so at this point we've got like two people that own it and I'll go in and I'll test a thing and I'll be like hey I want to do this like additive arm only pull out a thing and they like I think it goes here I'll shelve it in perforce so they'll take it out go no no no no you don't want it there you actually want it over here but at least I can get the functionality of it going so as to how deep it goes it's it's pretty gross we needed to actually create a second one just for pedestrians in the game that's just one flat graph so that each pedestrian wasn't calling each one of these monster graphs and then had to go like multiple layer deeps every time they like got stumbled or something right so I can't give you specifics of that but it's a lot who came up with those like character sheets was that done in like concept early on or as you guys were animating him

working were those being developed along the way those were developed pretty early on so I'd done a talk here at GDC a couple years ago at the animation bootcamp where I developed some of the ideas behind that on shadow of Mordor and so when I started on this project they had the traditional thing of here's some concept art and here is a giant wall of text that writers just went just went ham on and very quickly go that's a lot to read and when you've got a lot of characters that you're trying to understand its what are the core things what's what's important what do we need to communicate and so I spent a lot of time early on going okay what are we doing and working with writers and designers and you know trying to say what are you trying to communicate what is this system do you feel like this visual approach the I'm creating is correct so there there's certainly one of my babies and it's something that I still maintain and sometimes other people go oh I'm gonna update it over here no no no it needs to let's let's keep this consistent because especially with outsourcing when we bring in somebody quickly to do a character piece I can send them that along with some of their music and the

expression sheet have a quick Skype call with them to be like this is who the character is and they and they can rock it pretty quickly which is really important Thanks hey can you hear me yeah did you guys end up splitting the animations the upper/lower sort of locomotion and then any kind of upper-body actions like shooting etc we do have a couple upper body versus lower body reload we do a stand reload version and then so we can get the hips and stuff and then we also just to do an upper body as well so that you can reload while you're running some of the special abilities if if it doesn't feel right to cancel the movement to do an attack and it's something you want to be able to do while you're moving we also create an upper body for that but those are about the only times right we're you and you're like splitting them straight out or was it like an additive on top it's just a straight-up override we do have additive so there are a couple characters where we where we will do additive but we'll do that and then we do have some i case like spine binding

stuff that we can do to say okay this is what the hips doing then we want you to orient and be aware of that question about the procedural jump landing yeah I assume you did some tests with additive animation versus the procedural landing can you talk about like pros and cons using one or the other yeah so with the additive going on it was something that they had kind of been doing on the side and with the procedural is something that having seen it a couple years before and having talked to David it was it was kind of always me at all this would feel so good and I really want to learn about this more so we've kind of were developing them in in tandem and the procedural came on a lot earlier and once we then started wrap our minds around all the different places that we could leverage this and different in different avenues we really leaned into that heavy and and went from there it looks cool awesome yeah I'll let Rob know hi hi I was just wondering if the movement in

the world of the character is driven by the animation itself or if it's a physics based movement in the world yes so out of combat is entirely animation driven which is why it was really important early on for us to nail down okay at what frame do you turn by what frame are you up to speed because we want that consistency and it's really easy with animation driven movement to get a little sloppy with that and not have it feel consistent so we locked that on early for in combat it is 100 cent physics driven you know they want that ability that if somebody shooting me I want to move out of the way and not have to worry about a nice pretty animation so we let that get right up to speed and just blend between whatever the walk speed is up through the the run speed and then yeah we use that procedural so we at least get that a little bit of depth at that every animator wants to show that kind of push off and transition between oh cool I think oh one last question in time for one thank you I saw you had this rude note under each character so I wanted to ask how did you keep it consistent between characters and how were you

animating orientation of that know basically how did you make an animators life easier did you automate this stuff somehow or did you just hand key it yeah so in MotionBuilder we just have a tool that will align it right underneath the hips throughout all of it and then we'll check that and then usually it's like okay that doesn't look right with the camera and we'll make some adjustments there but at least we can do that to get a really quick base and then we also have a tool in MotionBuilder that allows you to save the offset from any bone to another bone so once you create a character pose and you feel actually I like it when the runs a little bit forward or back from it or whatever we'll save that offset as a pose list and then you can share that to the network and every animator can pull that down to make sure that that stuff's consistent again so alright everyone thank you if you have any other questions you can meet me up here afterwards or we can go to the wrap up room thanks for attending have a good GDC thank you

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