Animation Bootcamp: The First Person Animation of Overwatch

[Music] thank you thank you all right um first up I have some housekeeping things uh silence your cell phones and don't forget your evaluations that are probably email to you after you got buzzed in um so yes I am Matt Bame as she saids um I am an animator at Blizzard Entertainment on OverWatch uh so last year Dave Gibson who's over there he gave it a kick-ass talk about how we find and animate the core of a character from start to finish I don't know if that's still on um and it was awesome it was a little Fuller talk you've probably seen it if you were here last year or it was released onto YouTube so I'm sure many of you have seen it if not I highly recommend it uh later this week on Thursday Jesse Davis who's also sheepishly hiding over there is doing a talk on the uh pipeline of

animation on OverWatch so that'll dig in a little more to the technical process uh in engine all sorts of great stuff so not to step on their toes this talk is specifically about first person animation so it's basically uh how we go from that to that yeah hi Diva so first person animation uh my core thesis today is to talk about how we maintain the character cuz OverWatch is about the heroes how do we maintain that character as we go from this fun character design into hands and a gun and a camera um there is some trepidation when people jump into first- person animation cuz either they're bored by it because they don't really want to do it or they don't really get it but it's I don't know it's not that big of a deal first- person animation is actually really great place to start if you're a

gameplay animator cuz it has everything a gameplay animator does it's very player facing I mean it's right there in your face um and they're looking past your animation at the Target so don't fret the animation it's there it's great as long as you're doing it well they're not going to stare too closely at it but you also have the benefit of a locked off camera and no other gameplay animators can really say that have the benefit of locked off camera so let's get going gameplay first if you ever saw a talk by a blizzard animator or blizzard developer on anything I bet you they had to slide gameplay first this is enshrined in our around our AR our orc um so there is a lot happening there is a lot Happening Here uh it's flashy and fast and hella fun um but the first

person animator does not want to add to any visual noise they out of the way of the player so they want it to make your animation needs to be responsive and you don't want to take too much control away from the player and you have to provide visceral feedback as well as gameplay feedback to ground them in the world that you've created and that world that we've made is this big bright colorful world uh as I said earlier overwatches about the heroes when I first started on the team in 2014 and they showed me this stuff they didn't have this many Heroes when I started and I I looked at everything I looked at what I looked at actually was this they showed me these that they had already and I looked at and I was like that's amazing that's an animator's dream to do all that sort of wacky stuff

uh and I thought why are you making a first person game this could be a wonderful third person game but they're making a multiplayer shooter and uh is great cuz I that's what I love to play um so I took this from Dave Gibson who showed a very similar he actually showed all these slides last year for a good reason they fit perfectly into his talk um I just wanted to tell you that all of that the overlapping action overshoots the squash and stretch the snappy texture timing all building up to appeal all of that translates into what we do in first person and this slide is also exactly what Dave showed last year and because I'm sorry I'm moving too much for this thing um Michael biancalana kicked ass on this animation I mean look at it so it slowed down here at the end but

it has everything there it has the snappiness it has some nice flow to it well shoot all that secondary action of uh all the little fiddly bits moving and I just love this animation much which kind of bugs me because everybody says oh you're the guy that does first person on OverWatch you know what my favorite first person animation is Zenyatta like oh yeah me too actually but that was Michael aalana um let's move on into the actual Tech stuff so my talk is actually a little bit free flowing once I get to a certain point I'm just going to start showing you examples and talking about fun stuff uh but first on I just want to show you what we're working with a lot of it's going to seem kind of redundant to people who worked on Sho before it's but I think a lot of people might still get some fun joy out of seeing it uh these are the rigs that working with we're working with with it's a paired

down version of third person rigs uh you can actually see here that we just take the third person rig and call out everything that you're not going to see and the reason McCree still has his hat is because he brings his hat down for his high nunal anything the animator wants to add to the first person from the third person rig we can ask the riggers to to leave that in um if you want to learn more about how the rigs are built highly recommend you go to Jesse's talk um on Thursday but you can notice that he still has his root controller all the camera animation primarily we animate from the root in even in first person uh they do have another camera bone that we add accents with just little extra motion nothing too heavy and extreme that just sort of give you a little extra feeling to round you into the world and I'll talk more about camera stuff later I just wanted to show you this example too uh he has a

leg he's the only hero that has a leg in first person at the moment because uh Michael when he animated Zenyatta gave him a floating he sort of does this uh Indian style sit and floats in the air and he said well if he's floating his legs are free why don't he just kick you in the face so he asked got the leg in there and now he kicks you in the face uh this is partly how we attach weapons this is the classic way everybody who's ever attached a weapon to a in a game probably has done it at first uh there's an attachment bone that is at the very bottom of the arm chain I added the outliner from Maya just to show you how deep it is that attachment bone is under the hand which is great that means when you attach a weapon it's going to follow that arm where it goes without having to ik you can ik the left hand to that bone too so that it all moves together without uh too much desync issues uh but

there are cons to it as well this is 76 is prototype reload that I did so 76 if you're not familiar Soldier 76 is a Mr America Captain America almost probably shouldn't say that he's uh he's red white and blue gung-ho leader of the OverWatch at one point um so I thought oh top the loading gun uh top loading reloads are tricky for me because you can get your hand in the way the camera so easy trying to reload that with the left hand I know what's the classic American infantryman's weapon and that's that World War II weapon the M1 grand which I realized I probably should put that a photo of one of those up there so you know what I'm talking about um it's if you ever seen a World War II movie that classic gun that you're firing up and you get that ping sound and everything kicks out maybe some of you know some of you go o guns

gross but that's okay so I thought oh I'll just slap a new round a new uh magazine in with the right hand but what happens it's parented to that bone that's at the bottom of this chain so this prototype animation in Maya looks fine it's a little choppy because it's prototype but when you get it into engine even if you animated it at 60 frames per second and exported at 60 frames per second in engine you're still going to get subframe inter relation it's going to be variable frames per second um so what's happening is between frames that weapon bone that you're animating away from is trying to go back to the hand that is under in the chain so you end up with this wacky wacky weirdness so one solution for that is to just do the reload with the left hand oh hold on I got to find the your mouse turned off

Tim I got it I got it reload it with the left hand so this reload is ridiculous um I actually like it though cuz look at Soldier 76 he's ridiculous but it's also straightforward and basic but ridiculous so I like it he just slaps it in with he just I mean that's goofy but he's a little goofy it's fine and it's straight to the point KN straight to the point later of course we realize we want to do more with how we handle weapons so why not add a weapon attachment bone that's under the root so that we don't have these issues of moving your hands away from the attachment point and having the weapon trying to follow along so this is Anna's rig she has this

special weapon attachment bone with two hand control bones that she can hold to and you can see I put the outliner on there just so you can see it's under the root if you can see with all that text this wall of text that's on there um and she's using parent spaces which I will talk about in a second I just wanted to show you her reload first I told you free flowing and organic so yeah she's got a sniper rifle with the the bolt on the right so she's reloading with her left but pulling that bolt with the right hand so we can do more with taking her hand away uh there was at one point an attempt to fire her sleep Dart pistol with the right hand I think for uh just aesthetic reasons we ended up going back to the left hand so parent spaces many everybody okay I shouldn't say everybody maybe not everybody

certainly not Andrew uh many of you probably have parent spaces in your rigs now it saves the animators a lot of time you don't have to set up constraints that you know you're going to need every time you set up a scene with a weapon in it uh that's another thing that Jesse's going to talk more about on Thursday I just wanted to steal his slide real quick it's not his exact slide he's going to use but we have these parent spaces built into the rig so that her right what happen what's happening here is her right- hand ik is following the one of the weapon bones that is parented to the weapon attachment so that right hand the ik of that right hand is following that weapon bone so when we we can manipulate the weapon to actually animate the weapon to do what we want to do with her right hand will follow it and then if she has to pull her right hand away we just use this tool here to switch her bone to the ik Bone back to default without having to turn on and off a constraint and remember where our constraints were and stuff and then you can just move it how you

need oh this next slide might scare some people mys um so we all of our assets for a first person character are in one my file which is fairly traditional but the traditional way to do it is to have everything on the timeline at different points in the timeline uh you've worked on a shooter you've probably done it that way the way we're doing it is uh utilizing myors which in the past might have been pretty heavy um but it works great so now we can see every every asset that we are going to have all there and labeled so we can just put our base pose on that base layer and then each grouping of your assets your fire your run your jumps and all that are underneath that base pose so if you change that base pose it's going to Cascade down through those layers and you can still use override

layers as well you can just bring that pose onto it just click of a button um I like the old way very much of just doing it on the timeline it's great cuz it Doesn't bog your computer down as much and you can still use my layers to add things on top so I'm not saying sway is better or worse there's a lot of Pros to this there's a lot of Pros to the other way too so whatever works for you I just know that when I say say hey look at all these my layers some people go all right especially if you have the graph Eder over yeah and this is just a way of using the my layers so there's one run for junkrat and then just a layer under there that has his Detonator pose and then underneath that we can have other layers that have his Detonator animation that's separate and by playing on top of so in this case the run in some cases

the melee so he punches but if he has the Detonator there's just a layer that does that so he can open his hand up and have the Detonator in it all right so let's talk about the process of animating the first person so the first thing we're going to do is find that golden pose and that is where everybody dog piles onto it and this is the part where you're trying to figure out you're working with so the way OverWatch Works generally is that there's a third person animator working on the third person of the character a first- person animator working on the first person we've tried it in the way where one animator will own the entire character but scheduling needs means that's not possible anymore so the third person and the first person animator will communicate with each other with the designer with design uh with the character designer with the weapon modeler and the character modeler and

figure out who this character is what kind of weapon they're holding and how it should fit on screen with all the ideas of making a great pose thinking about your negative space thinking about uh leading your eye for the gun aim towards the center verticle and of course the fov which I want to talk about a little bit later there's another slide I still from Jesse uh that is widowmaker's early early prototype design for a rifle oh hey GL you made it um you can see that wasn't really modeled with first person in mind that he really just lose the sense of the gun and so going back and forth with the uh weapon modeler and finding out the correct camera fov for this we were able to arrive at something that is a little more appealing on the screen and actually reads a rifle the one on the

left doesn't exactly read as a rifle so finding the fov means just finding the fov for the player view model is we have the benefit in OverWatch I know a lot of modern games do this now but we separate our world fov the field of view of the world from the player view model so that we can scale and allow a slider for players to scale the fov without futon with our pose which used to drive me nuts um if you've worked on a shooter before you know that your wonderfully crafted posing can get stretched to hell when the player goes nah I'm playing at 120 which is great for them that's fine but my animation seriously though so I love this I love that I I don't have to worry about where

the player's fov needs are cuz there's a lot that goes into that whether cuz it's a cross-platform game it's there could be playing on their couch they could be playing with their face buried in a monitor they could get headaches at lower fovs they might just want a lower fov so they can get zoomed up on a enemy or a wider one so they have better peripheral awareness I don't care I got my great pose and it's going to stay where it's at so I find that fov in the camera in Maya and then I can type that into our Editor to match it and I get what I want which is beautiful and it's just a handful of the poses that we have uh junkrat Zenyatta symmetra zarya Winston Soldier 76 Reinhardt mercy and McCree just an example of some of their poses in game um wow the time around that thing's still going well um as I said earlier you can cheat the hell

out of your poses you have a fixed camera cheat the hell out of it when Mercy's the first hero I ever touched on OverWatch and I remember trying to get a good staff grip for her and I couldn't get it and my lead Ryan and Jesse like just translate the fingers into place I was like what yeah just translate the bones into place I I didn't have experience with that before so it's like you can just crank that thing out of there yeah so her fingers are all jacked up but you don't see that I mean hopefully you don't see that you'll never see that side of the staff in motion if she's doing her Quick Melee like this she's going to change her grip if she's doing anything she's going to change her grip you'll never see that hopefully so after you find your golden pose the quickest way to get good sense of physicality on it is to add additive overlays uh most games do this

where they add an aim pose Suite or and a roll animation or one Suite that has both the role and the aim in it this is another side is still from Jesse thank you this is actually on his demo Rio so you can see that just add it's a spring based pose just a set of poses with spring value on it that we can tweak per hero to get the different feelings because this is what I want you to think about that they're not just there to do this and to like do this they have purpose and they will give you character now this slide might hypnotize you when I play it or make you sick but let's talk about this so the these are the spring based aims and the roles each hero is different and we can author it differently per needs McCree who is in the top left he's a cowboy with this revolver he's cocky he's sure

of himself he's kind of been around the block and has a smaller weapon so he leads his Target and it's tight next to him is Zenyatta on the top in the middle he's a monk who's floating I told you about him so we can make his have this flow but he's a robot so it flows and snaps flows and snaps so don't just think about those basic spring aims as just something that give you the lag and lean but it actually gives you character road hog in the middle down there he's he don't give a he's got a big old shotgun and he's going to throw his hook at you and drag you into him so he's super loose and it's a shotgun uh bastion's also a robot on the bottom left and he's chunky he's not the nice harmonious robot like Zenyatta he's a chunky old warbot there's another one that might make you

sick so we're leveraging the same sort of system to give us poses for Lucio when you're uh wall riding I just wanted to show it because it's kind of neat I don't really have much else to add to that I just going to let this play so on top of the uh additive lag and leans that we have for aiming we have run leans too so we can add a little tilt to their runs when they're running side to side or forward and back but I just wanted to show you the character um that you get from it so Winston I I used Winston as an example because Gwen brought it up in a podcast um Winston is actually three-legged in a way because he's a

gorilla uses all three limbs to run but in first person we didn't have to worry about the foot contact of that arm that's coming in that arm was a pain in the butt to get right um I still don't know if it's right but there's always that balance between what's going to give you good physical feeling in the camera and what's going to make a player sick so it there was a lot of back and forth between how to get the weight and chunky of a gorilla in first person without driving a player nuts and then reminding them that they are a gorilla and they have this arm but you aren't going to see it contacting the ground because you're looking at Targets so we just wanted to give the hint of it without flashing in your without flashing in your peripheral vision I don't know if it's 100% successful but I'm I like it I think it

turned out okay I wanted I should have added directional runs for him too because he's got this way and this way and if it's got aims on that as well on top of that another overlay animation that if you look up the arm leaves the screen and if you look down you get more of it but we never have to worry about actually contacting the ground this is the part where I just start showing you cool cool examples um oh this is it in my so he's like a mile from the ground and you can see where I'm animating from the route to get the camera motion and then I'm adding a little bit on the camera a little bit of extra translation that gives this feeling without rotating too far in the uh the X you get that seasickness in the yaw or the roll I'm sorry the roll this is bat

Mr Chunky robot Genji the lightf footed ninja guy junkrat um I love junkrat he's crazy I wanted to say something extra about junkrat's run just because of the previous slide where I talked about collaboration I only have five minutes left oh sh we're going to go we're going to go okay so Kyle Ralph who did his weapon we went back and forth like oh going to add this bit and that bit just to get this nice chunky kit bashed feel out of his gun cuz he is a junker who just made his weapon out of crazy bits and pieces and so it's all about that conversation between him and concept and story of like who this character is and you can bring that into the first person animation all those little bits and pieces are handed animated to give that feeling of ch ch Chun CH chunk uh when I

first showed this to my wife she's like why the hell is he Galloping uh my first iteration of that run in first person didn't have that gallop to it but then I saw kyungho's third person animation and he oh yeah he has a peg leg and so we brought that in the first I think that gives it a lot of nice motion um since we have five minutes I want to get to some other things sorry I actually just started going off on tangents and I ran out of time this is uh mccree's firing um it might be dropping some frames in PowerPoint but you can see how much we're stretching the gun so what I'm doing is that first frame that you're showing I usually don't export that frame that's the idle frame the very first frame is super stretched out in space forward with the gun barrel scaled up

and then snap back on the very next frame just to get that feeling um I hope you can feel it when he fires but for me it's Push It Forward snap it back straight back and then it rocks up so it's kind of more like this uh you see a lot of I don't want to call anything out but you see some animation that's just bang like this is just kind of awkward so so we're snapping it really stretching and snapping it back just to give you that big feeling of firing uh here's ironclads which I wanted to show you because I just love how much it stretches and all the squishy bits that was animated by Jesse um this is a how we handle automatic firing versus single firing we can do that big single fire and then little ones that we can ramp into with a uh accumulate pose that's just a single pose that it sort of ramps

into as you Fire And you Let It Go and it plays an additive outro reloads another slide I took from Jesse um there's a lot that you're saying with reloads you obviously communicating the player that they can't fire anymore so it's okay don't cover the reticle because they still want to see the threat in the way but move the gun up you can actually rotate the camera and why and uh move it away from the reticle just to communicate to the player that you're not able to fire anymore it's pretty clear um I would avoid Frankenstein hands which is um just sort of um I'm like panicking now because I'm running out of time actually let's just skip it these are just examples of reload that I like each one different character

Reapers is ridiculous Michael biancalana did both roadhog and Zenyatta I love those so much uh the top left one D.A is Adam York she's super cocky this is like super cocky gamer girl so she's like yeah whatever uh so we brought that into first person too and I just think it works so nice Zenyatta Mr floaty monk I hope I'm giving you something interesting it's just goofy so he's just a big junky stinky roadhog and he's just throwing some random crap in his shotgun and his little buddy his little

buddy the other junker everything is just ah who cares get in there so as the first person and third person animate are animator are working together I I did actually led the charge on this where it's like I did the animation and then K was like oh yeah I can see how I could do that in third person uh May who's um super nice and super happy to be there and she she'll you up though so she's like yeah boo oops oh Reaper just don't give a I'm sorry I ran out of time you folks oh no keep losing your curse I BL

Tim look how much we're stretching out that arm and that leg on the contact frame that's just Insanity it just gives you that nice snap so everything that I showed you earlier about the that showed the third person animation with all the snappiness and stuff it's right there in the first person it's all about giving you the feeling the uh extra super stretch stretch happens on the fourth frame you you snap snap just we brought the weapon off screen first frame and brought started bringing the hand on and then really stretch it out and snap back it's similar to the fire really stretch snap and then a little hole so it's like and uh hope it reads it reads another camera thing you can run into is translating Z gives you great sense of impact that's forward and

backwards in my eyes it gives you a great sense of impact to have that in your Quick Melee just be aware of where your player Collision is and where how far out of that you can go before you're in the wall um the in the first Alpha McCree was punching through walls not punching through them his face was going through them and that was because his camera was translating too far forward Z and snapping I'm all out of time holy okay look at that that's awesome that was done by Jesse look at all the cheating that's going on look at that yeah cuz you don't K you don't care what's happening off camera you just care what's happening over on the left there same with uh Genji which is going to play next yeah look how cool that is isn't that freaking R look how far he's stretching that arm out that's Jesse

Jesse kicks [Music] ass I know she he already told me to stop and I'm like here Che out some cool [Music] okay that one's not going to play oh sh okay PowerPoint is telling me to stop now it just crashed so uh thank you hold up [Applause] I just wanted to put this up there while I walked away um thank you I hope I gave you some information I practiced this like a 100 times and never got fully through it so now I realize why because it was too long you rocked it uh I hope it was entertaining that was awesome all right thank [Applause] you