'Potionomics' Animation Show and Tell

[Music] thank you uh hi guys I'm Angel and this is my show and tell for personomics so about us um you know I'm responsible for characters animation I listed myself as pipeline Overlord because I like making up funny titles um but basically my job was to hire Emily the person below me in the picture to do my work for me for the most part and uh I mean you know how it goes right management it's a good role no but um so so Emily's responsible for animation but also a certain amount of concept art I just want to recognize that because she's a great illustrator uh about voracious games uh the way Johnny approached me when I was at GDC about I guess seven years ago now in that picture was he mentioned that it

was either starting a video game company or he was going to go play pro street fighter and I liked I liked that setup I really liked that background for the the founding of the company and the starting of our first project anyway so the game itself potionomics right the titular thing we're here to talk about uh was inspired by restateer little witch Academia and a hunch the Character Matters um that's nice to hear right uh so we and by the end of it we ended up with like about 3 000 animations give or take uh I can't guarantee that every single one of that last 247 is actually being used because there's always some spillover but you know we got through quite a bit and we got an Annie nomination so you know [Music] [Applause] [Music]

oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] nice and concise there we go okay so uh the the first thing that comes up is that like we really care about philosophy I guess which doesn't necessarily mean like reading philosophers and stuff but more so it means having like guiding principles and Concepts that let everybody have a common understanding of what the gut check is so like it's really really important that rather than telling you that you need to make a straight line you have a tool to make straight lines and you understand which

ones are supposed to be straight or otherwise right like in the case of straights and curves for example um so like the rules and guidelines aren't a structure but they tell you what the structure is supposed to look like right there they're a schema in your head for imagining what's gonna be that currently isn't sorry this is like weirdly abstract but I do like to talk like this and this is part of how we communicate in the context of of like our our meetings uh in terms of trying to if it feels like things are running away re-establish what it is that we're actually talking about in a very very simple way and I'll get back to why this matters and creates later but so um the title itself Show and Tell is because I like show and tells as a kid but also because showing versus telling is like a fundamental adage and kind of principle and guiding philosophy of animation and uh it's one that we

thought about quite a bit at the start and in school we were taught a version of it which was uh what verbs do you give the player right so it's like you let them show the actions and the events in the game using the verbiage that you provide to them in the form of gameplay mechanics so you know every good thesis is worth subverting and flipping around and questioning and saying like well do we have to show versus tell or what if telling is showing what if it's what if the thing we're trying to do is show just emotion and conversation and some kind of back and forth dialogue the feels uh not like they're just talking but that they're having some sort of authentic emotional Exchange um so yeah if the characters manage to talk about their feelings maybe we get to show the telling and kind of shortcut some things because all of this is leading towards like the economics and potionomics right uh I mean the

economics of the animation which is that uh we kind of chopped off a lot of it and uh yeah so let's see the other thing I wanted to hit before I go on to the next slide was the uh qualitative versus like quantitative differences um again this is just about when when you discuss something it gets really hard to talk about these abstract ideas so you always want to have some way to thread them to specific parameters that are on screen right like you're making a kind of abstract assertion that you think uh moving a parameter on a character's rig one way or the other actually means something regarding their emotion and I'll have some examples in a later slide about exactly what that looks like but I just wanted to put that conceptually out there so the other the other kind of starting ideas we had

or that I had when we you know kind of initiated the project was that doing all these animations is going to be pretty hard you know maybe we can trade the footage length of animation for packing in more character maybe if we don't have to do like let's say the anticipation then we have more time for the follow through and the settling right and like the most simple terms um and moving like beyond that I think it's worth thinking about um principles as things that you can like exchange you don't have to adhere to them because if you really want to be creative you have to be willing to both see and acknowledge and utilize those principles when they're useful in pursuing your kind of on-screen goal as well as abandoning them the second that they provide too much friction and start to get in the way you know it's important to be sensitive to that and that's where the abstract understanding

comes into play because that abstract understanding is what lets you understand whether it's going in the direction that you're actually trying to to proceed um yeah and then another really important idea was this whole thing about like that the game is in the player's head right no matter what we're showing on screen or Computing behind the computer screen the game itself is a sort of like Mirage like experience right because even if in the moments you're very tied to the things that are happening the inputs and the outputs and all the mechanical interactions uh a large part of the experience of the game is just your memory of what you took away from it right so in reality most of it especially over time as you get further and further away from the experience in question right that like point in time when you play the game most of your experience with the game is just some kind of memory reconstruction based on a few lingering data points of what you think you experienced when you're actually playing the game

and uh you know it's uh really important when you're trying to be creative and come with wacky new poses because eventually you start running out of ideas it gets uh it gets tough uh so before before we get towards uh animation principles themselves I just want to cover that I think also another really important thing for appeal and appealing animation is the models and being willing to spend an inordinate amount of time scrutinizing things and from uh I guess like an intersectional perspective of disciplines you know like I spend a lot of time drawing I've done all my anatomy studies um and I'm not sure there's really a way to skip past that stuff unfortunately I wish uh I wish there was a bit of a shortcut but uh nah it's probably a good solid like five years of regular life drawing in my opinion anyway I really do think it makes a massive difference because um the easiest way for me to Encompass it is the idea of draft and sculpture right

so draft is about the depth and the volume that you manage to represent and it's it's like it's one of those things that when you know how to recognize it it's easy to spot but when it's missing it can be hard to identify that that's exactly what's missing or what the what the Delta is there but draft in particular and having good volumes affects a lot about your ability to move the controllers and everything that's deforming the mesh along curves and arcs right so it's like if you want the animations to be on arcs but the components within your rig are moving linearly you're kind of always going to be fighting some sort of janky on-screen paths when you think about what the viewer is seeing inside of the 2D template right because ultimately unless you're doing VR stuff I'm not talking to you guys we're talking about a flat ass canvas right at some point it comes back to this little rectangle and there's some kind of relationship between any element on screen and the edges and so that

means it's all contained in that canvas and so uh yeah keeping it on arcs and doing all that nice appealing stuff getting the fluidity is uh extra difficult when you haven't exercised the uh discipline to make sure that it adheres to those things in its own structure uh one one more thing I'll say about it I didn't mean to dwell on this one for so long but also um it's important to remember that like the the state that any especially any organic thing that you're modeling is in is the outcome of a bunch of like processes right like no thing is actually static and so like the volume of your jaw is something that has been pushed into that volume by various forces right by the forces of like your bone growth that uh grows according to a certain logic and it doesn't matter what the details and the sciency bits of that logic are the more important thing is that you can identify that it's different for one segment versus the other so that when you're representing

anatomical features you understand how to resolve them as they start pushing against each other because that's where a lot of these things I find fall apart when people try to make models that are appealing but also flexible it's very easy to want to cheat things to the way the sculpt is being presented but then as soon as you start moving it it becomes an absolute nightmare that's why you know our sculpting guidelines the whole the whole bottom section is just re-topology guidelines stuff and stuff about like where polygons go and how they should how they should look um and this uh all these rules basically have a fall off from the characters heads and hands which are the highest resolution in all respects we pay the most attention to them in animation they have the most joints and basically all the characters they get the most polygon detail and then it radiates outward towards the other things we don't include on screen very much and that we don't really utilize to emote right because the Primary Emotion is always

coming through the relationship between the head face and hands and whatever they're trying to signal using those uh actually I pretty much already covered this part regarding articulation and the and the thing I forgot I forget those on this slide uh yeah basically good rigging range faces allow you to maintain those curves and arcs that you're trying to make I'm a huge proponent of trying to make everything uh compute everything uh move in FK manners right I mean that's that's like a common thing but I'm just like a massive stickler and I really believe that like nobody is enough of a stickler on this because you can always spot uh where animators are trying to cheat and use linear interpolation when they shouldn't so now finally getting to the animation principles themselves right we have like the classical principles on the left and then the ones we were left with on the

right we basically crossed off everything on the list because it was too much to deal with um the big conceit was uh uh actually it's funny to me like looking looking back at these seeing what the original how the original principles prioritize things right putting squash and stretch at the top shows me that one of their main concerns was the physicality and the physical plausibility which um I guess I guess when you're trying to discover animation for the first time that's probably one of the biggest challenges on your mind but for us we kind of Started From The Bottom with appeal and felt like maybe that one should be up at the top uh or close to it and uh in our version of the principles we write both character and appeal because again they have some these are this is part of that territory of like conceptual abstract differences um which one is the most important can vary at any given time whether we we go

with prioritizing just something that looks appealing in a sort of abstract sense of appealing shapes or we don't do that and sacrifice the appeal a little bit to maintain character usually has to do with the gameplay priorities right of what exactly we're trying to give us feedback to the player because every one of these emotes is attached to some card or action or game State for the character and so ultimately the success in communicating the emotional label that we never actually put on screen right like we don't say that the character's sad they just say something and they look sad so there's this like conceptual Gap that you're trying to get the player to understand and Bridge and uh yeah you basically do that using by negotiating all these principles and for us it's character pose and appeal are like the Holy Trinity right every it poses our main main tool everything

everything I try to break down into pose I'm like a big believer in post pose animation I don't know what they were talking about straight ahead I'm not about that stuff um lay the poses down we went so far as to basically block out the entire game in pose right like every single animation existed as a single static frame initially and it was expected to communicate that state and that action without any motion right static should be good enough if you don't if you didn't pass that bar it probably just wasn't that good of a pose and uh actually that's gonna get into the trademark poses right if it's that good of a pose you should feel comfortable enough putting like a brand on it and saying oh PM that is that character right this is unique to that character no one else is really going to approach that kind of posture that orientation uh Luna is a really fun one because like with the forearms you can do all sorts of creative unusual

combinations with what she is uh occupying herself with right it's always fun to give characters business but Luna gets to exercise maximum business which also fits with her character uh then Quinn's TM pose that was that was when we hit pretty early on just that sense of uh defeat and disinterest I guess uh whereas then anubia is a character who is cute and she knows it and she exploits it and uh Batiste is just always feeling himself good for him yeah so arcs I want to shout out arcs they're the greatest of the original principles aside from character and appeal um I think arcs are like it's one of those things where people talk about it incessantly but I feel like somehow we still don't talk about it enough or we haven't come to like a good concise way to communicate the concept because uh like so here in in

this example you can see some of my shitty notes that I drew over one of uh mint's animations and I put these on screen this way because I wanted to make it clear that like you know all of that drawing skill doesn't go into good drawings on top of these things it goes more into good selections of these abstract shapes right like if you look at that green shape that's uh formed on the middle mint right that sort of inward squishy shape is something that appears anywhere something that is something is extending so in terms of like squash and stretch to come back to that principle I think uh a lot of the times those I guess maybe one of my issues with like the Baseline principles and thinking in terms of like the 12 classical principles obviously nobody's super dogmatic about adhering to them but it's easy to get into that mindset and start adhering to something just because like just because it was said right that idea gets into your head and you start thinking about your conventional understanding of it versus

a subtler and more abstract understanding of it so in this case right that stretching shape indicates that mint as she's stretching out where it should bring her hands inward because that creates an FK motion inside of the rest of the motion right the FK motion around her elbows versus just trying to stick her hands out using the ik interpolation that you're not supposed to use you're not allowed I'm not gonna let you uh oh and another another little note in terms of posing is uh you know so one of the one of the principles we struck off was overlap and follow through but to some extent again we can cheat overlap back into the poses by spending so much time on these key poses I I drew a little indication there of the shape of the hands to have have the fingers kind of drag behind so if you're thinking about how to stick how you can like cheat one principle into another I think that's often like a good place to start

coming up with new ideas or at least options in terms of how to address address something in an economical and limited fashion right if you think about like South Park for example that was weird uh if you think about South Park for example they're not doing a whole lot with those characters right it's just about the kind of like energy the amplitude and uh yeah that's pretty much it they just use like timing and and I don't know what else I guess things move on arcs because they have to um so another another principle that We Came Upon was kind of coming back around to solid drawing so this is one that I think gets sacrificed like a lot in video games and it's often a topic you know something that we struggle with or we put a bunch of work and some little feature to massage a tiny little transition between some states that are

otherwise difficult to resolve um but yeah it is uh it is a real thorn in the ass that one and I think my favorite example is just ragdolls that's why I put this uh I think this is from a mod actually but just this GTA screenshot because I've always found them hilariously uncanny but also really inspiring because if players can accept that kind of Jank then probably they can accept us not having the first half of the animation on every single animation of the game um and so uh in terms of like the solid drawing concept the other thing I want to emphasize because we also wrote Every frame of painting we liked to talk about things that way we'd like to talk about uh you know maintaining the appeal and the solidity of the drawing of the character on all frames I think especially in game animation sometimes there's uh such an emphasis on the physicality of things because that's usually most of what's giving feedback about gameplay parameters that

people people tend to get really carried away I think with breaking rigs down right with this sort of belief actually previous speaker mentioned it that small Jitters in motion won't be detected but I think they really will be I do think I do think they do something in regard to uh to how people help people read it in their minds and again how they basically save the memory of what they think that they saw right because we're always playing with Illusions to some extent and it's also one of the reasons the animations kind of start in the middle of the action in potionomics is because well if they didn't quite catch the beginning maybe they'll fill in a little extra for us you know and uh it turns out they do uh so yeah so coming back around to animation principles and crit uh this is also another place I would I would say that uh any kind of background in drawing or general art is super super useful because

um it can be uh difficult to get good feedback and input on things if you're mired in technical language and jargon that isn't easily recognizable or easily explainable to somebody who's less experienced in the profession but they can have a lot of very useful insights and observations on how people Express themselves and if you're trying to replicate character that's really the most important part rather than the jargoning bits of all the principles that you're dealing with and uh so you know in that interest as much as I talk we tried to kind of minimize the active vocabulary of what parameters we're talking about and uh actually I don't like that that Twitter one is there I'm gonna get back to that one okay so uh in terms of feedback and acting and ideas and emotion acting it out should be compulsory okay thanks man uh acting it out really should be compulsory I think every animator should

just be like uh sent to the gulags if they don't like have time to live life and explore things explore some kind of expressive type of movement um you know dancing Athletics I'm not joking here like I really think it makes a and it's it's an instrumental difference right when Emily started working on the project she started snowboarding for example and all these little things give you new opportunities to recognize interactions between people and context within which they interact and emote so let's get to that kind of stuff the illusion of consciousness um so you know the illusion of life is the original one but to to me the kind of more important thing isn't just life because that's like a that's like the first bar right is that something is alive breathing but like when it's conscious and you want to know what's on its mind right what is it thinking and that's when it's able to have emotions and I use the uh the picture uh from RoboCop of of Kane's brain there with the googly eyes because that's kind of

how I I imagine this stuff on the most base level and I also find things like these uh these heat Maps kind of useful to think about in terms of like how where where does the feeling reside within the character however you know all these sciency little little factoids are great and useful but it's important to remember things like for example anger and happiness and love and pride if we look at them all from the chest up here they look identical right so again you don't want to get too stuck on any of these kinds of rules that you create or find for yourself especially anatomical reference the scientific references can be very slippery slopes especially if you think that you understand the material in question and then you start applying it very rigorously and find yourself down some weird wacky uncanny path uh way way after you can change course um so here's a few of the initial explorations of Sylvia kind of trying to search for her TM attitude I'd say the top middle one is around when we hit it

we also did get one contract animation from a friend of mine that was very informative but lost somewhere in the history of our files unfortunately and uh so these are the first uh some of the first successful animes that got splined out of the poses right uh these are some like really core Explorations we did because at this point we got to start thinking about not just the body language of Sylvia of one of the other characters but what is Sylvia's body language like when she is trying to represent the body language of another character right which things does she observe and retain and uh reflect from whatever she learned from the other character because the kind of fundamental uh progression mechanic in the card games is that you pick up different kinds of arguments you can use in haggling from these other characters you interact with and part of that involves understanding something about their emotional journey and them as a person and that's kind of what enables Sylvia to uh to imbibe that knowledge

thank you oh man I gotta stop breathing on this um yeah okay so now we can touch on the body language parameters uh really quickly how many minutes do I have left I think I'm like red at the end right okay awesome let's just blast through it okay body language parameters for me the most important thing is to remember that everything is pointing at something at all times right especially the face and hands right these are your big communication tools they're very articulate they've got a lot of little features and we as human beings are very sensitive to all the little nuances and changes in the shapes right so um then moving beyond that kind of reconnecting to the idea of the central nervous system the other thing I like to think about is basically what kind of torsion the spine is going through and where that puts the uh head chest and hips in terms of what they're pointing at because it gives a lot of kind of contextual clues for characters uh that you can utilize to think about

subtext in their body language right so for example some characters are going to be maybe more prone to to covering their stomach right or covering their chest or how is it that they if you think about the heat Maps what is their reaction to where the energy or heat is sitting in their body during that emotion just because they're feeling the same uh kind of like temperature temperature fluctuation in their body doesn't necessarily mean that they physically react to the same way right some of them may react to it directly some of them may want to not indicate that they're feeling that and uh that basically comes from where things are pointing at right we kind of tend to think in terms of is it pointing at the other character or away from the other character and if it's pointing away from the other character uh what is it pointing at is it pointing at something here is pointing at something there is it pointing at something in the past are they thinking about something in the future or are they imagining something and further you can consider you know um does the character in question look up or down when they imagine something right how what is their emotional

connection to the thing that they're imagining in their mind and that's you know that's the way I was referring to earlier in terms of like having kind of simplified geometric parameters because when you make the conversation less about like the timing of something and more about okay does this character want to wave directly at Sylvia or are they like more casual about how they wave at Sylvia right that makes sense yeah because then you can think about the actual like just it's just a change of angle right that's all that's all we're talking about at this point but we're able to kind of tie it more directly to the kind of uh emotional connection or lack thereof and again the subtext layers of which emotions we're talking about with any given component of the body um eye lines also lines arrows like I said everything is pointing at something uh I I really enjoy these expressions

from Boston um but yeah I pretty much already explained this one uh no rake hands please ah God for God's sake don't ever ever just grab all the controllers and rotate them together the human hand doesn't function that way I would recommend Bridgeman I'm a big fan of his I think one of the most important things is to understand how to simplify hand movements and to think of them in fewer surfaces than you actually have right because there's a lot of little bits to hands and fingers they can be hard to manage I understand but uh you know simple geometry can get you through it it can help you uh let's see final ones uh okay so uh one one other thing I want to point out about silhouette it's like a pet peeve of mine people like to talk about silhouette we're over okay okay people like to talk about silhouette but they don't think about internal Silhouettes so in this case um you know we have uh Batiste holding a

mic there in the middle and uh the initial thought is to maybe bump his elbow out so that you can see it in the literal sense of the silhouette edge of himself but if you really understand that the context of this is for him to show the mic and make the mic clear then the more important thing is the angle and placement of the microphone rather than where his elbow is right and that isn't really breaking out of his physical silhouette but really it gets its own silhouette by virtue of color contrast just within the space of his chest right so it's important to think about it in a graphic nature and that's it [Applause] [Music]