Animation Bootcamp: 2018 Tricks of the Trade

[Music] this is tricks of the trade we have exactly six animators they have exactly five minutes to give you the best tips and tricks they know please do not clap in between each one save all of the plots for the very end we are animators and we need every second you have take it away Vanson hi I'm James Benson I worked in Triple A for 5 minutes on fable and then a cancelled boy simulator then I made or in the blind forest and fire watch and now making in the valley of gods yeah I want to talk specifically about some unity system stuff but the gist is all sort of broadly applicable so tip number one avoiding state machines and trying to keep your animation sets within a single blend tree so the problem with state machines basically is that they give you these kind of binary possibility states where

you're either standing or you're crouched and this isn't just a visual problem it's a controls one why a blender is better so you can exist indefinitely in between two states you can transition on linearly by driving floats makanan by default when you're going between states you can only do linear stuff it's completely hard-coded there's no way around it most importantly they synchronize the footballs and now scale time so that everything is seamlessly in sync so that's sort of the basics using these bits of knowledge you can replace almost all of your locomotion transitions with dynamically control blends so here when we hit the ground we're blending into the Crouch movement state that we used for the previous little jiff and we can also define how far you're going to blend into that crouch movement by how fast you were going when you hit the ground so you can actually get a much more dynamic thing than you would have just by authoring a single clip think of your blend tree like a flowchart asking a series of progressively more specific questions so

here we're also asking how far away are you from the ground and because the answer is not very far rather than throwing you into a new state with a big falling leaf in your arms in the air we just put you into a sort of a slow falling walk we have one foot out to catch you when you fall and then we do the little Crouch bumps and all in the same blend tree it keeps you in the same foot phases and it's a sort of seamless thing if the grounds further you can go into more traditional falling loops and if it's really far you can do these kind of I'm gonna die when I hit the ground animations and again when you do hit the ground you know that the feet are gonna perfectly be in phase and it's all going to be nice and seamless by putting your time into variations on your loops for different directions accelerations etc you can skip a lot of individual clip authoring and management and then you'll also find that because you've made so many movement cycles you'll just naturally create much broader possibilities for movement in the for the character so tip number two build multiple layers of dynamics into your

idle behaviors so people can NPC alive is really hard making a character's awareness of the environment into the clips it works very very well in a game like World of Warcraft but if you need your NPC to be able to dynamically direct their attention like say into the player's eyes in a first-person game you're going to have to have some kind of dynamics however if you build your lookout stuff as like a single like a chain it's going to be very rigid there's gonna be no overshoot or overlap so if instead you split your character tension and to say the eyes the head the chest the equipment they're using even if you want all those things pointed in one direction they're going to get there with different timings and even better you can you can put them in different places so for example they have their torch on an interesting thing in the environment and then they dynamically look back to you with their head and eyes to sort of signal look at this interesting thing I'm pointing at combined with locomotion you can create interesting behaviors like dynamically looking over their shoulder when they're

walking backwards or tracking that the path they're moving along to give a sense that the character has some kind of forethought and those sort of systems work nicely with full body okay to rein in kind of stuff and you just generally build a percent that the character is animated within the space in the game and not like a series of clips in Maya or 3ds max my next tip is facial capture this is mostly a thing for of small teams but my assumption until relatively recently had been that face cap stuff was gated by enormous budgets and team sizes and it turns out that's just not really the case the software and hardware can be gone for a few thousand dollars and largely it's the same kind of stuff that big teams are using it's more expensive just like getting a lot of people to crunch the data but I think that it's not something that's super commonly thought of in small teams as a feasible option and even we've got two animators now--come

santo but ii when it was just me and I was doing this initial test it still seemed like a very feasible thing in the pipeline in terms of the time it takes it's on and so forth so those are all my tips and tricks if you didn't like any of them hopefully you're like Jaleel so duels tips good we're good we're good hi my name is Jill Elsa doll and I am the CEO and co-founder of still more studios it would be presumptuous of me to tell you how to build a successful company I've only been doing this for three years and I have a feeling I need 10 more to really get the big picture and it's even more ridiculous to be doing this in five minutes but here we go most people ask how long since we've opened steamroll Studios and usually I say three years but in reality it's taken over 14 years my whole career a good reputation is crucial someday if you want to stand on your own in this industry like running a studio a strong Network and a good rep will be extremely extremely valuable

it's a very small industry where everyone knows everyone how do you keep a good rep you work hard this is Lee our community manager focus on the achievable dream not the blue sky blue sky dream each step you take make it your best step forward if you find yourself wanting status then you are doing it wrong the title of supervisor or director will find you when you are ready you want to be remembered as a hard worker if you're given a C shot don't complain just do the best you can you will get noticed if you put your heart and soul into it and it might be something that your colleagues never forget keep in mind the best animators out there can turn C shots into a shots now that's a skill that will get you noticed be remembered as someone reliable nope wrong I got it there we go it's difficult to get your first job but

it's even harder to keep a job make yourself invaluable to your team if you are new to the team your chances are limited yes most supervisors play favorites therefore work towards getting yourself noticed we apply the same philosophy has similar Studios if we work hard for our clients they will always remember us and point others in our direction integrity is a huge part of building a strong team be honest with your clients it's better for your brand if you don't take a job than take the job and do it badly treat your team and clients like they are a big happy family they will there will be ups and downs but in the end the product as well as the process will represent your brand don't just partner your best friends partner with people who are as hard-working as you are leaving your big ego at the door is the first thing you do in a partnership know whether to trust your instincts or not trust it use a good 10 years of your career as a guide study decisions you've made and where they've led you but also do the

same for your leadership team sometimes you have to trust in your business partners decision even if you disagree if a member of you of your leadership team makes the wrong call fix it learn from it and move forward easier said than done but it works animators can be a bunch of drama queens I know I'm a bigger one myself I speak their language happily walking around the studio and bothering everyone means your shot is going really well putting your headphones and hoodie on means your animation is not looking so good the trick is knowing how and when to help them sometimes you just need to let them be other times jump in all that grumpiness will spread like the plague my point is know your team well with that respect it all falls apart too many companies promote based on seniority it's a touchy subject you want to be respectful and promote your senior employees but how many of you have worked under supervisors you just didn't believe in promoting someone only because of seniority will disrupt the

team and put a needed pressure on that person promote based on merit and respect we'll follow three years ago we all took a big pay cut luckily being in Florida we were able to survive but when your studio finds stability make sure you re-evaluate everyone who made sacrifices at the very beginning or you will lose the same people who helped build your company have a strong philosophy at still more studios we believe in never being scared to fail on all said it I live by it in the past I only had my family to worry about now we have 40 people and their families as a small studio we have to take risks but they have to be calculated risks make sure your leadership team understands your company's philosophy if they do everyone else will if I tell you that high quality of work and a family oriented company is our philosophy you say that that's everyone else's model but before making any decision we ask ourselves can we produce the quality of

work that represents us and can we also do it can our team also do it within the deadline we don't take a job if it's going to hurt our team with a lot of overtime well if you give me ten million dollars to risk in pong in a week maybe I take it in the end our team's well-being and the quality of work we produce is our brand thank you very much and next we have the lovely Al Madina [Applause] okay working hello my name is Thumbelina Soria and I work another dog today I want to give some tips about motion capture starting with what to do before the shoot often motion capture sessions are done externally we pay for space actors data so it is very important to plan ahead of time before shooting you should have a very clear idea of what you want to capture and how this doesn't mean you can't experiment in the stage but the bigger decision should happen in advance it is important that you talk to designers game and creative directors to

the excuse how the performances would be what speeds and high are required and what is the tone of the scenes before you should previous the scenes and implement them in the game these will answer a lot of questions before the capture the more accurate the previous the better the capture would be once you know what you want to capture create a shortlist have different fields for all the information you need name description on the move characters probes try to keep it all the information in one place also try to organize the shots so you don't have to jump into it between them use a good naming convention so you know what you are capturing but just looking at the name have in mind the actors and turns don't have them doing a Crouch moves it for five hours or a sprint right after lunch so mix it up not only will help the actor well-being but also their performance when shots require a build try to sort this in order so you don't have to take those builds down if you're going to lead there later my next tips

are related to the day of the shoot we work in empty spaces and that makes it difficult to communicate what we want to achieve to the actors so take references with you to show them things like foolish on the game concept of the characters environments script of the scenes and previous when given directions start by describing the context and what the situation is and let them act when reading this book directing actors have learned that if it doesn't work and it's absolutely necessary to give some more details use verbs not objectives for example don't say something like at nervous instead you could say move faster try to breathe heavily figure it with your hands I want to emphasize though that it's very let them act instead of giving such specific directions also listen is what the actors have to say all the time they come up with ideas that are very very valuable have someone

that is not directing the shoot taking notes so when the data is deliver you don't have to look through all of it to know what you like in the first place when capturing gameplay there are specific requirements these are speed movement trajectories beginning and impulses these restrictions can make the performances as stiff and very unnatural but they are necessary I like to start by not even much direction at first in a star restricting from there getting an accurate data on the stage will have will save a lot of animator time you will need to find the right balance between the time spent at the stage and time spent spent just in the animations here are a few tricks we use for gameplay captures guide on the ground to keep the actors on a straight line cones to measure the speed and guys to make sure the actors end up with a correct foot position when capturing movements or scenes in parts make sure you choose a good branching point match the poses and momentum and make sure you have

enough data so you can do a good blend between them and finally some tips to manipulate motion capture data when assembling takes together make sure you spend time on assembling face because before committing to polish avoid for the sliding Bigler or pops ideally if something was in capturing properly you will recapture it but if you can't try to do your best while working in nonlinear editing such as tracks or time editor when the designer asks you to make an animation faster doesn't mean make it faster just mean make it shorter so instead of speeding up the animation as a whole you could try to make just some of those parts shorter for this I use a trick which is blending animation with itself in tracks or time editor I look at the original data and analyze where it would be okay to collapse time places struggles long recoveries settlings are dissipations these methods allowed for a very fast iteration without losing data

and it's a very very visual way and my last steps while working on a scene use video reference from the shoot and keep the original data so you can always compare it to your edits and next on its Johan alright hi okay everyone my name is Johan currently a principal animator at Riot Games working on League of Legends I first got into animation by taking a 2d animation course and many of the ways I approach my authoring my 3d animations and problem solving is still from a very 2d perspective these next tips or I should really say my habits are things I noticed myself doing on a day to day basis so here we go trick number one draw on your monitor I use a dry erase marker to dry over my animation as a way of tracking what I've done so far or to plan what I want to do next here's what you need dry erase

markers whiteboard cleaner cleaner refill microfiber cloth and I just want to say haven't ruined in any monitors so far and but I work on Dell monitors I don't know about Apple ones they use special coatings I don't know so use discretion here are a few things you can do with the marker well we can create a line of action idea to pose and basically you can rough in your pose and line up the character to the drawing so it's fun another thing we can do keep track of contact points like foot contact and hand placement you basically mark the point and you slide your post back in place it's really great way of tracking swings and arcs by dotting the keyframes and connecting the dots you can visualize the path this also lets us visualize timing by tracking the spacing between the poses we can see how fast or slow something is moving which kind of leads me to my next tip that's a tip number two use evenly spaced keyframes and so what do I mean by that when doing

this I set keys along even intervals I like in this case every three frames and delete anything in between and I should emphasize is usually for a small range like a swing or an attack and why is this useful well it lets you visualize your timing in your animation when jumping between your keyframes I mean I try to explain using this movement here you can see the object is accelerating in the beginning of slowing down near the end and I'm gonna show the keyframes in that movement you can see all that you can see how different the spacing is at the bottom and let's just say we were to key evenly for the same move in like every four frames and I want to compare these to it and show you how we can actually see the time timing visualized and looking at the spacing of the non-uniform poses I have no idea what the speed is like because there's no constant where the keyframes exist in time looking at the example on the right we know each poses four frames apart and then when looking at the poses now we can clearly see that the ball is moving slowly in the beginning zips across in

the middle slows down near the end I hope that my last tip orthographic views use orthographic cues I'm not sure I mean I'm sure you guys already do this but I just want to emphasize how important it is especially when you working on 3d games where your animation will be shown from multiple angles and by no means are these views accurate representations of the final animation what what they would look like but it's a really good way of gut checking your work by eliminating depth it can help reveal posing mistakes and other flaws in your animation here's an example of a pose that looks okay in perspective view and look at it from front view and we can see that the pose is off balance an orthographic view is really easy to correct this post so let's let's do it there we go orthographic cameras can also be used for tracking movement here's an example of a character flying through space the animation is shown in normal perspective

here it is from front and side orthographic views and this is a really useful useful way of tracking arcs and I can worry about making changes a dimension at a time I can track gravity as well by looking at the vertical spacing between the keys you can also track them up top see to see if he's moving in a straight line and and generally I found that overall if you can make your movement look pretty decent inside front view and sometimes top it'll generally look good in most angles and you know and I found myself in the beginning not using orthographic cameras due to how inconvenient the interface was maybe it was because it took too many clicks I then I've since created myself hotkeys to quickly switch between two different viewports so and you know definitely something I use every day and I'll include a link to the scripts and hotkeys at the end of this so let's see to summarize what I just rambled about draw on your monitor using dry erase markers use evenly spaced keyframes use orthographic cameras and

if you wish follow this link and should take you to my scripts thanks for your time and next up talented caller okay hi my name is Kyle Chittenden I work at a certain affinity and today I will be talking to you about animation tests animation tests we all do them we all lose countless hours of sleep doing them and at the end of the test we all feel like we needed more time and it could have been so much more but we go to bed fairly happy with our completed animation until we wake up literally three days later and come to fool ourselves into thinking that what we've just submitted was utter trash so if you're a student looking for a job an employee looking for a new work or someone who just got laid off and this may be looking for their next step listen up because I've been where you've been and through it all I've learned some important things so here are my animation tips and tricks that have helped me out through the painful moments of animation desks pre-production pre-production is like your best friend an adorable pet and a

pint of ice cream all combined into one delicious palico companion I urge you to take a good chunk of your time for a pre-production in searching for references relevant to what you're animating don't know where to look for references well I've got good news for you you can start you can basically look anywhere games movies novels comics videos of you doing actions indoors outdoors honestly you can put your dog in a mocap suit and film him anything to make sure that you have the best animation background possible to what the test entails now also while you're doing this be sure to come up with a background bio for your character if they don't we have one this will help you a ton in knowing how they interact with their environment ask questions like what are their motivations what are their strengths and weaknesses what are their current views on net neutrality and the authorities that govern it the deeper you delve into the characters background the more you can give them a unique personality and an animation test that defines who they are second tip double hugging controllers to avoid gimbal lock all right so if you're an animator like me than you love doing animations full of flips and spins however if you're only using one controller to do this

then you might notice something a little bit unnatural and this is because of gimbal lock which gives priority to an ACCI while rotating an object if you're having gimbal lock issues during flips and spins and you can't send it back to a rigger to fix it such as during an animation test well then you might want to try out the simple trick create a new new circle and scale it so you can easily see it around your character then parent the original master controller to the new controller you just created use one controller for all the flips and the other controller for all the spins because you're dedicating each controller to rotate in only one direction the unblocked shouldn't be a problem anymore and you can go about making your sweet animation 3 use reactive objects to clarify animations ok so a test entails that you have a two-prong combo attack but you're not really sure if everybody is able to see the second done tackle and well the first thing you want to make sure of is that you clearly portray that second attack landing however if you're still a little bit paranoid then it doesn't hurt to add a static mesh that reacts to the character's attacks so go ahead and make a mesh and have it representing the enemy it doesn't need any crazy animation just make sure that you give it a representation of weight

this is cool also because depending on how much weight you give it can show how much power each attack has when it lands lastly play blasting animation to send it into the company noting that the mesh is there as a representation of the enemy this lessens your anxiety and shows that you were thinking of how to do the attack with an enemy in mind the whole time for twinning the correct way no I'm not talking about twins here I'm talking about when two objects move in parallel at the same time Thank You mr. Obama for demonstrating if you're an animator new or old then you've probably heard that twinning is bad however I'm here to tell you it isn't as long as you do it correctly Tim rudder goes into this concept more in-depth but let me reiterate that if you're twinning that's okay just make sure that you're breaking up the animation to account for it space your timing so that the poses land at separate times lead the motions in two different directions offset one part of the body so that makes the character a less symmetrical avoid consecutive twinning poses throughout the shot and be intentional with your movements many successful games and animations and movies have done this successfully so you'll be in good hands when you're trying it out for

yourself and also and lastly don't commit until you're ready this isn't marriage advice this is advice on when you should start a test if you're currently in the middle of finals week if you're crunching at work or if things just feel a little bit more hectic than usual don't start an animation test companies will often send you a test and give you an allotted amount of time to do it however they're usually pretty flexible about when you can start the test itself take them up on their offer and don't be afraid to say that you'd like to start the test a few days down the road also if there are other candidates trying to take the test the same time as you they're not gonna pass you up in line as long as your animation is good that's what matters and the only way you can make the animation the best it can be is if you have the time to commit to it fully and that's my talk hopefully hopefully these tips will help you as they have helped me and if you didn't like it and you fell asleep throughout the presentation well then hopefully at least assisted you in a 5 minute now alright lastly is Gwen Frey there is one rule alright my

name is Gwen I am a technical animator I am a studio founder for the molasses flood and I'm the sole animator there I'm gonna showcase tips and tricks I used while working on this character scout she's a prototype character we had in game or she's just a prototype character we had when I started out with her I wanted to make a character they had absolutely no transition animations at all a transition animation is an animation takes you from one loop like a run or a walk to another loop like an idol it tends to slow down your iteration because you have to update it every time you update either loop instead for her she is for animations total for her locomotion an idol a run a walk and a kind of hard stop animation if you look at this video you'll see that the moment Scout stops moving the foot she has planted on the ground still stays in the ground the foot that's in the air plants and she'll shift her weight onto the newly planted foot and then slide the foot that's on the ground to match where it needs to be for the idle location the way I did this is I made to float tracks in the walk in the

run cycles there each float one float track is for the left foot and one is for the right foot and they'll blend from one when the foot is planted on the ground to zero when the foot is in the air whenever the Scout stops moving I freeze her locomotion animation and I can query these two tracks to see if a foot is planted on the ground or not I also added a remain planted float track to the hard stop animation this track is one for the first half of the animation and blends to zero over the time I wanted to move her planted foot to the idle location now all I have to do is multiply that is planted float track for each foot by the remain planted track and the hard stop animation and I can use that to drive the blend for the eye kate argot bones I just said I'm using AI K target bones let's talk about I okay you this strategy requires that I have I came running on my character at all times this is pretty typical for me and I tend to setup by K in a similar fashion for all of my characters I have bones in the rig for the leg I hate targets these bones are constrained to the ankle bones but parented under the root of the character since these are in

the rig they're automatically exported for every animation I make so anytime in engine I need to figure out where the feet should be in route relative space I can just query the location of these bones I also have bones parented under the pole vectors for the leg I K I figure we're as animators we're already managing the pole vector we might as well bring that information into the game into the engine and use that to drive our pole vectors for the in-game I K as well I use that K for run stuff but I use it for all kinds of other things as well here I'm using it to make a quick and dirty kind of slope variation for all of our locomotion all I did here was I took the I Kate argot bones parented them under a world orientation bone and every tick I cast a ray down to the world and find the normal angle of the world to set the orientation of this bone this will obviously orient the eye K this will orient the eye cave feet to the ground you'll notice if you're watching here very carefully that s her feet approached the ground they blend into the eye K and they blend out whenever she takes her feet off of the ground also whenever she's jumping for instance in game AI k will turn off guess I'm doing that I'm exporting that from Maya

as well so I actually export the blend between AI K and F K in Maya and I have that float track drive the in game I K in engine what this means is I when I'm animating something like this jump I'm thinking and as I blend from FK to Ike a that her feet in I came might be slightly manipulated by slope variation or something else in game I just keep that in mind as I animate speaking of jumps for a traditional jump you have a looping fall animation and then you kind of hit the ground and you blend really quickly into this landing animation you don't have a lot of frames to play with if you do that you can't really give the character a lot of weight I generally think this kind of looks bad I saw a talk that Lauren did for Paragon and I kind of stole his idea instead I animate the land from a much higher point off of the ground and I ever feet reach through the collision cylinder and touch the ground before she actually hits makes contact with the ground I don't actually play this animation what I do is I query the distance she is from the ground and I use that to select a

frame of this animation so to reiterate that was that animation happened it started with her a hundred units off of the ground so an engine what I'm doing is I'm detecting how far she's off up the ground buying that by a hundred and playing the frame there's that percentage through the animation this animation does not play I am selecting a frame of the animation based on an input variable which is in this case the distance from the ground this is important because like say she could be falling at different velocities they could manipulate the arcs it doesn't matter what the designer does because the animation is data driven her feet will never penetrate through the ground I use this concept for all kinds of things for instance I just like how turn in place animations are usually set up it's usually a lot of different football animations butting together in some kind of hot mess instead of that what I did for her was I made one turn in place animation that turns her 360 degrees and I queried the worldspace orientation of scout at all times and I used that orientation to drive the frame that I'm selecting of this animation so for

instance as she's turning as she's turning and the engine to text that she's turning left or right this animation will play forwards or backwards I'm constantly selecting a frame of this animation based on her world space orientation well you're seeing right here is actually only three animations one where she's has her feet moving when were an identical animation to that that just has her feet planted on the ground that I blend to anytime the world orientation is not changing and then an additive Idol that plays over the whole set up so with three animations I can actually make a pretty decent turn in place all right this has been tricks of the trade you may know everybody stand up thank you we have we hit it perfectly and have no time for questions have a

wonderful day