The Animated World of 'Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart'

[Music] thank you hi everybody um this is crazy so it's really wonderful to see all your faces um even covered in masks but uh yeah let's go I sorry I'm new here anyways um I'm Lindsay Thompson I work at Insomniac Games in Los Angeles California and I want to thank everybody for coming today to hear about the Animated World of Ratchet and Clank Rift apart I had the great honor of being a senior cinematic animator from the very beginning of production uh I got to work side by side with my lead Kevin grow and animating on and also supervising our cinematic team for this amazing once in a lifetime

project I want to give a little bit of a background on my experience in animation and how I got where I am today I have been animating in film and video games for about 15 years I went to Otis College of Art and Design where I studied 3D animation after graduating I got hired at Rhythm and Hughes in the apprenticeship program where I worked on my first film Alvin and the Chipmunks which as an 80s baby was very very exciting for me after that I worked on the Incredible Hulk and a few other movies um before getting hired at WETA digital in New Zealand I worked on Avatar while I was in New Zealand which was a really fun opportunity to animate Tales and then on to Legend of the Guardians in Sydney Australia at animal logic I continue to hop around the world a bit

I actually ended up back here in San Francisco at industrial Light and Magic where I worked on Avengers and Transformers three one of them it was it was the one of the better ones um a quick stint at Disney Animation where I worked on Wreck-It Ralph which I fully consider my entry to video game animation I got to animate a lot of really cool different styled animated characters uh and even like Sonic the Hedgehog in a Disney movie which was totally weird and that was really cool um I went up to Vancouver Canada for one more final project and I knew I was really ready to move on to something different uh I reached out to a former teacher who was actually working at Insomniac games and took a big leap and applied and I've now been at Insomniac games for the last nine years so my first project was sunset overdrive and this was a really awesome start to

get into video games I was working on the cinematics and I even got the opportunity to do a little bit of voice over work so you can find me in the game somewhere uh I can tell you about that later it's a little not safe for work what I ended up doing in that game so um next I got to work on National Ratchet and Clank PS4 which was very exciting for me because that was the game that really inspired me over the years to keep Insomniac always in the back of my mind is if I ever worked in video games that is where I want to work um on that game I got to actually create direct do the cinematography for our first shipped cinematic and that was such a huge career highlight for me that was such a change from coming from film getting to create the entire scene from scratch which I think is one of the most incredible benefits of doing animation in games as opposed to film so after that I worked on Spider-Man PS4 I was on the open world team tried

something different and then finally to ratchet and clean drift apart which we were so excited to do um in this talk I'm going to get I'm going to talk you guys through the process of our cinematic and gameplay animation I'll discuss some of the processes and inspiration uh behind the wide variety of Animation how we worked with other departments and how we took on such an ambitious project so first up let's discuss cinematics so cinematics are non-playable cut scenes in our game these are nearly identical in process to how we create scenes for film or television they're used for spots of emotional storytelling High action transitions or spectacle moments we knew starting out in this game we wanted to create cinematics that rivaled any feature animated movie we knew with the PS5 that we were really going to get a chance to test out how

far we could really push the quality of our work so cities are typically limited to locked cameras and that the player cannot control and there's more than one way that we applied them in our game uh so to start there's two main types of cinematics in our game there's cinematic Transitions and cinematic cut scenes so these differ in lengths and content transitions are mostly interstitial big exciting moments whereas cutscenes can be any length really and typically help tell the story as you can see here we employ the use of a cinematic as an exciting transition moment with a bit of spectacle that other ways may not have had as large of an impact within the game camera we're able to transition a character from one area of gameplay to another with ease our cinematic cut scenes were able to tell a much deeper Story show the characters emotions and thoughts in a much more intimate way or sometimes just like blow stuff up and do crazy things

so first off cinematic transitions our game engine technology and the PS5 allowed us to create seamless weaving from gameplay to cinematic and Back Again so you can go through combat and running through a chaotic environment to a spectacle cinematic moment in an instant this helped us significantly with World building and fluid storytelling we can highlight a mechanic or an environment while keeping the pace up in gameplay these are the ones that you almost feel more than you notice and see and the goal is just not to stop the player for very long so many cool things in this case so can a cinematic cut scenes on the other hand are where we slow down which sometimes only metaphorically or literally to highlight a major moment in the game this is the heart of our story and the height of our action

um so how do you build a cinematic how do we take it from something that's rudimentary and representative to something polished and Final I'm going to share with you here this is an example of a scene that I was lucky enough to get to previs uh the entire scene as well as animate a large chunk of it myself all the way to final so I consider this again to be one of the biggest perks in working in game development on a cinematic team you get the chance to be a director and a cinematographer and an animator and cinematic billing is really one of the most rewarding aspects of our job so first off we start with the script we read a script and talk to the narrative team about the plot what we want to achieve with the scene what we want to get across during Rift apart we worked really closely with our writing team we actually when we were still in the studio I sat back to back with one of

our writers who was also born in Jupiter Florida and it was the weirdest thing ever um so oftentimes in the past I've worked at plenty of places where these two departments are kept on an island they're separated you know the writers in their own creative hole and then once it gets to animation we're just building this thing um working back and forth but through some really big difficult scenes um this helped us write the best story it helped us create the best visuals while remaining friendly to the budget um in our fine finale of our game we we got a big team together in a group chat and we said how are we going to do this how are we going to show it how can we fit this into the budget but also make it cool and they were just happy to give and take with us we knew how things are made they knew how to tell that story um but yeah so so once we get the stripped we move on to previs we were fortunate to be able to previous most uh

if not all of our cinematics in ripped apart uh so this would basically be taking a really rough pass after reading the script doing a quick pass on cameras editing staging and timing this laid the groundwork for our animators to focus on creating their performances what you see here is a bit of a previous plus it's kind of a hybrid between blocking and prevas a lot of times even in pre-vis you won't show the character popping from pose to pose they'd just be sliding into their positions so for this one rivet just won the part that she needs to fix clank's communicator and she's gloating about it and so that was kind of the initial main thing of her walking in is she's being a little bit of a jerk about it not a jerk she's she's just proud uh so from um after the previous process we'll start Gathering assets to set up the animator with the scene to begin working on we'll make sure they have the set the

actors props anything that they're going to interact with available to them to block everything out and Rift apart we key framed nearly everything so our scenes were built from the ground up this differs from a game more like Spider-Man where a lot of the time we're capturing motion capture data and doing more human type characters this game was so full of non-human characters that we we're kind of forced to animate everything which doesn't really bother an animator um so scenes began with a kickoff and performance discussion we'll discuss acting choices and emphasis on getting the best performance possible animators would show an initial pass for sign off and I consider this the most creative process this is when our animators are empowered to make creative choice at this stage oh no what have I done hold on okay so this brings us

to our polish stage so this is once the performance and acting choices are approved and we can really start putting in extra time to all the ears and Tails and props and bits and Bobs and all that stuff uh this is and this is the stage where we really wanted to push our work to film quality our animators really got to dig into our incredible facial Rigs and we had amazing facial blend shapes that allowed our animators to create the most expressive performances that we had ever created in a ratchet game but of course this is not the final work that goes into making our scenes film quality final lighting effects audio environment secondary cloth hair simulation they all go into making these scenes feel so cinematic you can see in the background uh in our levels they're filled out with vignettes and NPCs created by our gameplay animation team this particular level in the game

actually has a lot of really fun Easter eggs so I recommend you play it and you walk around and wander and dance and all the things that you can do in there so clearly we would be nothing not nothing but not much without our other departments we wouldn't have a game uh effects lighting fur Tech rain wet fur atmosphere sound music it all goes into grounding us into the world of Rift apart so another huge part of what made this game so special for many of us was getting to craft and develop our newest hero rivet rivet was a dream come true for the team and for me personally it was an opportunity to create a new hero from one that we'd already known for so many years so when we started to do some development work on our character we started with who is she as you can see early in production we really explored the possibilities of who she could be we thought about strong quirky characters that have inspired us throughout our lives we wanted her to be tough and strong she

had a different background than ratchet but who they are at the core Remains the Same we wanted them to be alike but different and thinking of her backstory rivet unlike ratchet has been on her own for her whole life she never had a best friend like Clank to help her through her struggles we asked what has her life as a lone wolf in a dangerous world made her into who is she at her heart has her time alone uh made her a bit awkward when she finally gets the chance to interact socially these were all questions that we asked ourselves before going into full production to make sure our animators had a real good grasp on how she would behave in certain situations at her heart she's kind determined resourceful but always level-headed uh she'll take an enemy down with a smile on her face knowing that they're no match for her strength and width as we would be passing her off to many different animators to work on it was

crucial that we figured this stuff out and we also made a concerted effort to figure out who she isn't so despite her tough exterior and perceived coolness she's never cynical dark or cruel sure she may not know the best way to act in a social situation but she sure as hell isn't shy she's on a mission for good so shown here we have some early concept character art to show off the various aspects of her personality I volunteered myself early on to help figure her out so when I first saw these Concepts I quickly wanted to dig into an early rig that we had of her face and see how far we could push her expression and appeal so this is my test that I did here fortunately for us we had amazing character artists and rigging team to help facili facilitate this reality for us these were very early 3D pose tests that I that I created uh to show the team that we would be able to embody the

appeal that we see in the best feature films I was then able to create a pose library for our animation team from these poses and obviously each scene uh and facial performance was ultimately hand crafted and key framed but these came in great handy for a previous process when we were trying to sell an idea of what was happening in the scene sometimes that that blank default face doesn't quite uh go all the way and this was a quick tool for our animators to be able to do that this also helped with keeping our characters on model um that's a term that definitely comes from the 2D world where they would create character sheets showing what the character looked like on model and otherwise you would push it too far and it would start not to look like our character so these guides were really helpful for the team as well so it was really important that we got enough early development time in to capture her spirit and as we were doing this work we really knew that we were on

to something really wonderful rivet's an important character to so many of us at Insomniac and our goal was to do her justice and just as an aside uh she was my favorite part of game development on this project and actually my favorite character to animate in the entire 15 years I've worked on anything and I've worked on a lot of really cool stuff but she's amazing um a lot of love really went into her and uh hold on sorry anyway it's just been really exciting to see all the community response to the character we we thought that we had something great and everything uh since then has just really uh backed that up for us and it feels really wonderful so next up I want to speak about our gameplay animation team and the incredible work they put into making this entire game feel so alive so the first stage of any Game feature

uh or animation is concepting it out all animation starts off from an idea at the beginning we would concept and explore what exactly what we wanted to focus on with our heroes enemies and Living World actors who they were what type of environment they lived in or why they were the way they are we had the opportunity on this project to create the most unique and varied cast of characters we have ever put into a game before and the PS5 simply begged us to keep adding more one of the main starting ideas we had was how can we make gameplay in combat even more awesome we had so many previous games to build off but we knew that we were going to have an opportunity to push it much further variety personality and humor were key pillars of our production foreign so first up we have crowds in living world

we were looking to create moments in the game that not only made the world feel alive but also creating moments that technically could just happen if the world existed and the player wasn't even watching sort of like the day-to-day was still happening regardless if the player chose to look at it or not we wanted moments in the game where you could see a reaction and Recovery happening in real time like after a fight broke out between a hero and an enemy or if the hero roamed around the world how would the civilians or NPCs react around them we wanted our worlds to feel very lived in so in this clip we're in sargasso which is our Lush Wild Planet and this moment with the dinosaur was created as a moment that you may or may not see if you don't pan that camera up while you're walking through that section of the game um but it's part of what makes every corner of this game so special this attention to detail was something that we insisted on getting in each level in each planet of our game so we even have like the speedles and

flyers that are roaming around freely in this world these ambient actors exist with their own unique animation we worked with a design environment and rigging to make sure that all of these actors were placed and integrated into their own unique spaces in our nefarious City Mission we made good use of our buddy follow mechanic as a tutorial tool as well as a storytelling and visual experience animation along with our programming team was able to create this super successful gameplay experience that educated the player while still making them feel very empowered with traversal foreign so another aspect that we wanted to improve upon in our next gen Ratchet and Clank game was making smarter and more interactive NPCs we built out more robust NPCs with more animations so that the reactions could be specific to any enemy type or direction that they're moving

pathing was improved as well as variety and of course we were also able to include some really fun Standalone vignettes for more life another really cool thing that we introduced in Rift apart was the speedl this was a totally new mechanic for us at insomniac this feature was really fun to iterate on and just exactly how fast this thing could move how Ribbit held on while she was riding uh how she made it go faster as it's less frequently used as a mechanic in the game we also were able to leverage these characters for inside of our pocket Dimension puzzle challenges you'll notice the Blurred shape on the legs when it's going full speed and we actually used blurred texture cards animated to get that rapid looking effect on the legs I love all the details that were added as well to rivet when she's going at such high speeds all the fluttery ears and tail and fur all of that stuff goes into like feeling the speed

so moving on uh to our enemies our team initially focused on how we can make enemies uh enemy interacts engaging as well as immersive we wanted each faction to have their own personality as well as their own attack styles that felt unique to each character whether it was the goons for Less faction or the nefarious bot enemies our team made sure that their personalities came to life through movement so we have three main types of enemies in Rift apart so first off we have our popcorn enemies and these are our fun little one-hit kill guys like our sand sharks or our toads attacks cause damage quickly especially when they swarm the player so we include these types of enemies because it's important to maintain a variety during combat for the best possible feel these were some of the less complex to create animation for as they lacked any

sort of stun or stagger but it's always fun to be able to amp up these really over-the-top deaths for these one-hit kill guys because that's pretty much all they do is die um so they had much smaller anim sets than our main enemy factions so our enemy factions in Rift apart consisted of three different types we had the goons for Less who were working for nefarious uh we had the pirate robots and we had the nefarious Troopers so we made a concerted effort to differentiate the style and personality of each faction for the goons for Less we went for a total Jim bro who always skips leg day and never misses an arm day uh we really wanted to make a leg day goon for less but we just didn't have time just giant legs uh so pirate factions are most over the top and cartoony faction they have tons

of squash and stretch they are like our classic uh old school animation it was so much fun to work on these guys uh and there's actually some pretty great smear frames in some of their animations if you use that photo mode really well um nefarious Troopers are also really over the top they had a much different type of traversal that ranged from hovering to octopus style neck legs personality wise what they lack in brains they make up for an overconfidence so the enemy factions had a much greater sized anim set than our popcorn enemies so for example if you would hit them from below the reaction would be like a stumble or if you hit them from the side you would actually feel them stumble or fall left or right back all of these animations were key framed and each has their own Flair when it comes to reacts from defining runs and walks attacks and reacts we got to add a lot of struction

squash and stretch to our atoms and the team had a particularly fun time with all the death animations you can also see how much work went into all these enemies due to the fact that we have so many custom weapons in the game that will stun or kill differently and these aren't really your typical shooter weapons I I wish I could share some of the weapon pitches that didn't make the cut into the game uh the best thing about working on a game like Rift apart is thinking up something like a topiary gun that would transform your enemy into a topiary Bush and then adding some sprinklers to water it and then adding some flowers growing out of it and then some butterflies and how does the enemy bust out of it this all this stuff you know the stuff was pitched by our animators and it's a rift apart game is so fun because you if you've played them you know the guns are crazy it's as fun as it looks

so finally we had our boss enemies to tackle so our bosses in the game range from a mechanical flying caterpillar uh to a giant robot Emperor nefarious who uses riffs to shove his laser shooting giant head at the player our small But Mighty Boss team created such exciting unique player experiences that stood alone uh completely outside of regular anime combat this one in particular is my favorite working on our Rift functionality our team made one of the most unique gameplay experiences I know that I've had and like seriously how fun is that it's so cool my jaw dropped the first time that I saw it I was like I didn't even know we had a giant nefarious bot so last but not least uh we have our heroes in focusing on gameplay for both Heroes it meant refining the bass that was there with ratchet and building on it to

create rivet we wanted to make sure that these two Heroes could be told apart in their own distinct way we focused on a ton of new mechanics and platforming that felt fun and relevant to the world of drift apart and created some distinct personality Idols for both ratchet and rivet this meant that for active or even Still Moments we got to instill personal Touches for both characters and of course we also had our Clank and glitch rounding out some secondary hero puzzle missions as well foreign we wanted to make sure that each one felt unique while still being able to maintain some economy of reusing assets and if anybody says that they don't reuse assets I know you guys know uh this is a great way to build off something tried and true that leaves

room to embellish and improve we were able to differentiate them with unique idols and idiosyncrasies as well as their own unique weapon of choice hammer versus wrench based on our heroes traveling to different planets throughout the game they also picked up some of their own Unique Mechanics so here are some examples of personalized traversal and some idle Flair rivet was able to use the spatial mechanic while ratchet got his own hover boots which are so fun by the way so what were our main challenges in this project the PS5 really helped us many ways but it also set up some huge challenges how could we best take advantage of the incredible speed that we were now afforded from this we developed things like the rift tether mechanic and our epic fixer battle on the grind rails we were also able to have so many more

characters and things moving on screen at the same time so this forced us to create some of the greatest variety and character animation that we've ever put into a game so another snag that was uh was discovering that those real-time Reflections turned our sweet little clank's head into one big reflective ball uh so we noticed looking back at some of our scenes finally an engine uh that he was reflecting some parts of himself off camera that were not animated and uh mainly and cinematics obviously uh so we had to hop back in and to quite a few scenes and make sure that there was motion happening that you could see reflected uh on the underside of his chin so um the sheer massive scale of this game was was just a huge challenge we had Heroes enemies NPCs creatures fauna spacecraft sheep you name it it was a lot foreign

so how do we get it done lots of ways we key framed a ton of a ton of this animation to keep that fun style of Ratchet and Clank but we did use mocap in instances where it made sense to keep our teams moving fast enemies NPCs and even heroes benefited from this from time to time partnering with an amazing Outsourcing team at vasg to work hand in hand with our cinematic animation team so one of the best benefits of working during the pandemic was kind of the Level Playing Field of what Zoom did for teams especially when everybody was working in different spots it really felt like we were one team I worked with our vasg team all week every week we we were one and it was really I'm so grateful to work with them they they did such an amazing job and then finally quick iteration and

quick implementation not being afraid to try something fun and working across departmentally to get our craziest ideas actually in the game I cannot tell you how many things in this game somebody worked at their desk made something funny sent it to the team and we're like okay it's going into the game how do we get this into the game there's a lot of that so I hope you enjoyed hearing a bit about our animation team and our experience on Ratchet and Clank Rift apart I could not be more proud of a project it was such a joy every day to think of something crazy pitch it and actually put it in the game and I want to give another shout out to our incredible team at Insomniac and our partners at basg for taking home the coveted Annie award for outstanding game animation just a couple weeks ago I'm just so proud of them uh this team could not have deserved it more and I'm truly thankful to have been a part of it so thank you that's my talk

[Applause] so if anybody has any questions I think there's some microphones I'm just gonna dance until somebody asks the question oh yay hey Lindsay um oh wow that's pretty good yeah um great talk um I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the um the rigs and the Squash and stretch if there's like if there's anything special that you were doing if there was any tests that you had to do and if you worked with the rigging team to to try and find the best sort of processing pipeline yeah yeah so uh he he's basically asking about the squash and stretch for the team if there was anything special that we had to work on with rigging to really get this stuff working yeah um so we we had a rigging team of

three people um for the whole game we may have had an intern come through here and there and our interns at Insomniac are amazing and they do work on the games and it's awesome um so our team was was small but Mighty and we would typically send them case-by-case requests like I really need to be able to stretch these arms and we'd send them a little note najira and uh and then sometimes they go oh we can't do that and then but most of the time they they were able to go in and make sure that it worked for us we we have never had as many different rigs in a game because you'll know working on teams you typically have shared rigs for certain enemy types even if their mesh is different um there's every size and shape here so it was definitely the animation team getting creative we definitely broke stuff we're just breaking things it's you know it's it looks fancy but yeah

we're just pulling things off their okay and you know all that stuff um but yeah but the the rigging team really came through and made sure that we had the ability to scale things when we had that request and that back and forth was also something that was rapid and awesome for us to be able to do our job cool thanks very much thank you hi hi um so I was wondering if the team always knew that mocap was going to be a part of the process or if the always knew keyframe was going to be a part of the process or if realizing how many different moving characters you can now have on the screen um sort of made that a reality I think it's a little yeah a little of everything we certainly going into Ratchet and Clank that is a very keyframe heavy project that always has been that way it's always been super stylized if you look at the old homes they're really over the top like we've

definitely grounded it back a bit in certain aspects so keyframe was always on the table uh mocap was something that clearly we had become more and more familiar with over the years obviously insomnia because oh you know use mocap for Sunset Overdrive for resistance for our Spider-Man games um it's something that we're familiar with so we have that already built into our team knowing how to use that so when we had certain scenes that we knew this does not need to be over the top none of us were afraid to take advantage of that I would say we had you know a few specific Shoots for the for the game and it was really the gameplay team more that was using it I I mean I'm trying to recall many if if any cinematics actually used milk out it's possible I don't want to say that we didn't and someone's like hey I did um but yeah it came out of doing things

smarter not not harder so it works where it works and then there was other places you put throw a little bit of mocap on like a weird little alien character and you're like that looks like a guy in a suit you know so it was it was really taking advantage of all the tools we had to to make the best animation thank you so hello hi um I wanted to know for the hairs and the tail did you use some Physics or it's all uh keyframed for for this part um we animated the Earth and tales yes yes um I think there were tests done and I think animators it's sometimes you know we have holes that help us kind of generate stuff like that um but it's still kind of keyframe animated I don't know that much was

simmed again I don't want to like say hey I simmed all those ears um no but uh at least on our team uh in cinematics yeah we animated them okay all those ears and Tails yeah thank you thank you hi Lindsay fantastic talk um cinematic transitions are deceptively complex I was curious if you could talk a little bit about like how Insomniac balance that difficulty between level design changing and gameplay beats changing and lurping between player controlled character and camera and cinematic camera and just how you dealt with all okay yeah yes you know where I'm coming yes I I hear you uh man it was a lot it's that's that's where the teamwork really comes into play that is where you oh you're saying all of all of our all of our problems um yes they are deceptively difficult

and I would say they're much more difficult than putting a cut scene in while we do have uh you know we we've learned a lot on our other games uh you know in Spider-Man and Beyond of getting things going from cinematic back to seamless gameplay we do a ton we've done a ton of that already in in like our miles games uh Spider-Man and we that was something that we actively wanted to do in Rift apart where these transitions were seamless um so we did get a lot more practice on our big scenes and that did help us with our action scenes but yes those changed a lot and those are those scenes that you start at the beginning of production and you're still finishing them at the end because oh now the level design changed the Beats changed um it's it's building a really good relationship with your designer on your mission and uh quick rapid iteration so and and and that goes to getting things in actually

as early as possible because that's how you develop you know that's how you figure out these issues if we were to animate our beautiful little cinematic transition moments and hang on to them and keep them keep them close uh that was a big lesson for me too getting into Game Dev I worked on film where you like animate your perfect little spot and then turn it into someone oh sorry uh and never see it again so it's much more collaborative it is hard uh but we we care deeply about that transition feeling good and games are about feel so yeah I don't I can't give you too much technical information because I'm like I don't know some someone who's smarter than me makes it work that's fine thank you so much thank you hey Lindsay Xavier from free agents we work with a lot of production companies we do a lot of cinematics with with gaming companies

um with timing and you touched upon this a little bit with timing getting shorter in terms of the ability to to Really finesse the animation and the process yeah what are you working with internally with those time frames when you're looking at a creating these cinematics you obviously have a a toolkit and a lot of the the shading a lot of the designs a lot of the animation already from the in-house team when you're being asked and tasked with creating these narrative cinematics what's the time frames that you guys are working with internally okay uh his question sorry I have not been repeating these questions for the camera but uh he's asking about the the kind of the timeline for cinematic creation and what kind of deadlines and timelines we're working on creating these correct um they're quick and that was another rude awakening coming from film to games um you know we sometimes these games and you guys know we're making like two or three feature films worth of cinematics these are

three hours of cinematics that's a lot um but we're making a ton and so we're on a very quick schedule and we typically have smaller teams and I know that sometimes that lends itself to maybe less polished animation um but I would say that our scenes and ripped apart were anywhere you know you would you would have maybe a week or two to previous the scene out um and then we would go anywhere from three to six weeks sometimes they'd go longer on really big complex multi-character action scenes and that goes to the is mocap gonna help us here all these background characters is it going to be helpful if I can fill these people out with animation rather than animating like a weight shift on an NPC which is so hard um so yeah I mean it fast definitely faster than film but uh but yeah we are on on rapid schedules and and we're always

trying to figure out what's going to help us here once once this gets in lighting and we we always want to get it in as soon as possible because we want to start problem solving or seeing what environmental aspects are going to cause us trouble um as soon as possible so in the previous stage we we try to get it exported into the game looking really rough and then working on those problems right away so it's it's fast it's very fast iteration and the team is amazing and yeah thank you all right that was a great talk uh you said something I really empathize with which is uh you know remote work really leveled the playing field you get to work with you know your outsourcers and uh I was curious if that changed the way you defined how something was done uh like you know when did you determine something was finished when you had that much more cross-collaboration between teams like did that change your Approach at all or so he's asking uh did the kind

of Level Playing Field of Zoom affect uh how we determine when things were finished because we had so much more communication um I will say that I think It sped the process up because again it felt like we weren't kept on separate Islands we were we were all in this Zoom meeting there wasn't like well the Outsourcing team is going to show up on the camera on the wall and we're all here in person as a team we were all together um so just it feels like the pandemic really upped our ability to be more available for quick communication because there was no tapping somebody on the shoulder so you had to be a lot more cognizant of your presence online and your availability um that said I'm not sure how much it affected how far we would push things we still always have budgets and timelines

and how much time we can put into something and we try to make the best choices you know there are times when you're like well we may need to sacrifice a little bit here but as long as this part of it's looking good it's going to feel good so that really came down to some of the decisions great thank you hi um when it comes to building a scene and you've got your previous stage and at some points you're going to be adding in all your background assets and your characters and you've got a team of people who are working individually how do you find yourself coming together with all these assets that synergize well instead of just having a really busy scene that's kind of got a bit of a visual fatigue to it or is that all kind of sorted out previously blocking out before you start adding everything together that's a good question um she's asking about how do we work with all these different teams to make

sure that like all the gameplay teams and everybody's placing their own stuff in the level and and making that not some kind of visual fatigue of too much stuff how do we coordinate all of that um that goes to getting this stuff in game as soon as possible so when it comes to cinematics we definitely do Drive the visuals and oftentimes there's plenty of times in a lot of the games that we've worked on where I need to show an establishing shot of this and I need this person to show up and walk in here and be here but oh there is a table right in the way can you please take this table out of the scene and environments usually like yes we can and we're like thank you so uh but then every now and then you find out this table is critical to gameplay and we go okay so then we have to adjust so it's really I will say that all of the teams at the studio are typically very very nice to

us cinematic animators in can we make sure what's what's really cool is that you'll be like this is what's happening in this scene and this is actually a really emotional moment is there any way we can make sure that there's a light highlighting this thing and lighting's like cool thank you for telling me that yes I'll make sure that that's lit I'll make sure that that is important in the scene so we are working together with every Department to do this visual storytelling and then going to put it in game a lot of that stuff you saw in that scene that I was animating is done by gameplay animation and that is what is playing that's all happening real time in the game and then once we return to gameplay they're all there so every now and then you know we're like so we did that scene and that scene ends up being a little bit emotional that's the first time she talks to ratchet all this stuff and then we noticed in the background that there's like one of the more it's like riding a bowl and it was like when we first shot it with our

cameras we were like oh that's a little that doesn't feel right but we couldn't really take the mort out of the bowl because when you go back he's riding it and we didn't create animations of him jumping off and jumping back on so we're gonna take that camera and make sure that we can't see him during this really emotional part of the game so it's totally just constant collaboration thank you hello hi uh just real quick I'm curious in the early level design process when we're building a level we have lots and lots of cinematics that need to go in and what we usually have in the beginning is I guess kind of a black screen with text that describes what's supposed to happen here do you guys do the same thing when you're stubbing in these gameplay transition cinematics and and the proper full cinematics what does it look like in the earliest version great question uh he's asking what does the Cinematic look like in really early production when we're stubbing everything in and and when the designers

are really going to work on laying out the level um we do black cards for sure um those are usually put in by the designer very early that's even sometimes before we've even on our team started playing through the mission and feeling uh the Beats of that so that's that's a tool that they'll use to make sure that anybody play testing is going to know that a cinematic is coming there there are some times that we're able to get a some kind of a 2d animatic in where it starts to at least have like a little bit of timing and some dialogue I record a lot of scratch audio at the studio I've I've played every female character and every one of our games uh so we do that a lot and and then once we get our previous past we try to we hook those up as quickly as possible because it really helps the designer with flow and we always have to work with them how do we come into this how do we go out ins and outs all that stuff so yeah

there's definitely some black cards in the game at first do you guys work with uh storyboard animators or is it something you guys do uh it's it's really on heart we in 3D the previous we didn't really have I think sometimes like sometimes designers would grab some concept art from our amazing concept artist Dave Dave Curtin and uh if we had a few others on the project and sometimes that's used as visual representation but we typically did all of our previous in 3D okay great thank you closer we did what time is it anybody okay we have 10 minutes hi Lindsay hi oh that's loud hey what's up James so uh you let us know that rivet is one of your favorite characters yeah uh what was your favorite animation that you did for rivet and why okay and

why uh he's asking what my favorite uh animation I got to do with rivet uh it's actually it I think it is in that scene that I showed just when she just mean mugs Clank after he giggles animating Clank giggling and her reaction to it was really fun and I just I mean it's all like it's me like that is she is me um it was it it was fun to relate to a character for once my career has been full of like big hulking monsters and robots so to actually feel like you get to put yourself into a character and she's like she's smart and kind of sarcastic and uh all that stuff so uh just any anytime I get the chance to do a really funny facial expression on her um was fun and then I I didn't actually get to animate but I did get to lay out in previous our final scene of the game um with with rivet and kit uh having a

moment and I definitely cried a little bit the first time I saw uh the two of them in game with the beautiful sunset so yeah that scene was really special too thank you thank you James hi hi oh god oh it's so loud sorry um thank you so much a really incredible talk um I'd love to hear you speak more on um when your team is sort of whiteboarding out all of these different bespoke animations that they want to have happen in the background of a world how do you go about um like prioritizing what can be built out of everything they want to build and then how do you as a lead help um help like protect the motivation of your team when things that they want to do aren't just aren't able or just not in their production budget yeah that's a good question

um they're asking about uh when you know there's so much ideas and so many characters to work on how do we parse that out of what gets in the game and what doesn't and how do we protect the team and their intentions and making sure that that vision is seen um it's it's hard and there's there are so many pitches on The Cutting Room floor that are really fun but uh you know oftentimes we in a game like this you can get so creative and so so many ideas it's it's it's a Well of creativity and we do oftentimes think of things that are super fun but they're not in right for the world or right for the character necessarily even though it's the most fun thing you've ever done or seen um so there's a lot of does it fit into the world does it add to the game is the game okay without it um obviously when it comes to all those smaller NPC characters the critical

stuff is obviously the main moves that they have to be able to do directional attacks directional reacts uh you know um traversal stuff like that so that stuff definitely gets prioritized but we do get to a stage I mean every character that can Idol also has um personality Idols so we we make sure that you know you you have your basic standing but what are they doing when they stand for a really long time we everything gets something like that and there's other characters that we realize that you see more and so we put more time into those knowing that the player is going to get to experience that a lot and every now and then you know you put a ton of work into some there's some really fun pirate stuff that actually gets totally hidden by some of the weapons like you know like the squash and starts and all this stuff and you see it and then there's just like a cloud of smoke but you still feel it you do see it it's in the game but

um you do that that again is another reason why it's so important to get this stuff hooked up as quickly as possible to start seeing how often is the player gonna interact with this how often am I going to see this realizing that when these popcorn enemies show up you kind of just take them out right away so maybe they don't need idle Flair because how often are you going to stand and just watch them all hanging out in a field um so that's kind of a bummer sometimes but uh we do try to make sure that anything somebody's really passionate about uh that they're able to put it into the game and and that goes to reaching out to other departments and getting support and I you know we have a very supportive team that's this is cool let's get this in the game let's get spider cat in the game so um you know there are budgets but if if the team is really passionate about it we'll try to make it work cool thank you so much thank you

hi hi um I was wondering how early you start working at the visual effects Department um and what that kind of collaboration looks like if you're under the same umbrella for trying to get things like the direction or the feeling or the timing of animations Incorporated yeah so you're saying you work in visual effects I was curious how we work with the visual effects Department animation and visual effects um again it's very collaborative um we oftentimes as scenes are in their really early phase will show a blocking pass to other departments and we start talking about uh we start talking about things that we'll need from other departments so you know um if if we have a moment where a character is like moving and then like their arm catches on fire we definitely have to work side by side giving them

it's important for us to give them what they need sorry to do that uh we have to make sure that they get our blocking pass as early as possible so that they can do their blocking pass and then we refine side by side a lot of people think that production is like step one writing step two then we block it is that's the path of game development it's constantly passing stuff back and forth and back and forth and I change that arm so now you got to change that fire I'm sorry and we locked that and no we're unlocking it it's and we do yeah it's it's it's non-linear and it's it's hoping hopefully you're getting each team of the department kind of working on the different various phases together and going back and forth and you know all of that stuff so yeah it's definitely not linear cool thanks

thank you hey uh I have a question how much animators are involved in play testing and if you would be able to say if all the team basically finished the game like played the whole thing and played the whole thing yeah so he's asking like how many animators are involved in play testing and do I know if the whole team played the whole game uh during production we're always playing the game so we are always play testing whether it's not official or not we're constantly it's really important for us to get in the game gameplay actors especially are constantly playing their levels making sure that things are placed correctly working with design and that everything looks right and then cinematics it's really important for us to see how these things are flowing from gameplay in and out and then especially those those transitional cinematics those are high action those should not slow you down or bog you down and so we have to make sure

that that's feeling good as for the team playing the whole game I definitely didn't play the whole game during production but I totally platinumed it after it came out and it was really fun it was like my first Platinum ever on any game I just really had fun playing it so yeah I think I would say probably like designers were close yeah uh yeah designers definitely play I you know we're just we're just like in animation World sometimes so yeah all of that but yes I play the game cool thanks I think is that it are we good um thank you guys so much this was really scary but it was really fun so uh I think I might be in another room uh to do follow-up and rate and review me I don't know smash that subscribe button I think there's something in your passes so uh but thank you guys so much for coming [Applause] [Music]

thank you [Music]