The Art of Destiny's First-Person Animation

[Music] so this is the art of first person animation my name is David hsby I'm a senior animator at Bungie Studios and uh I've been there for about six years my game credits are at Bungie or Halo Reach and now destiny at subsequent dlc's and uh yeah so I want to start out by asking you a question and that is what makes a bunge game feel like a bunge game well a lot goes into the creating the first person experience but first person is something that's going to affect how the game plays and feels on a momentto moment basis uh and many of you not many of you may not even notice it if it's done right so this talk is going to be split up into three parts so first we're going to talk about supporting the goals of sandbox design secondly we're going to talk about making first- person content that feels good and what does feels good mean really uh I'm going to talk about that

later and finally I'm going to talk to you about uh how to keep from killing yourself in the process of making a game and uh for all of you game developers out there I'm sure you know what I'm talking about so so what is first- person animation well first person animation is just the animation it's the movement of your avatar from your perspective as a player including the player camera so all that motion you see uh I mean at some designers have really told me that this is the most important animation in in a first-person shooter and whether you believe that or not uh doing this content well is something that's definitely going to help the playability of the game and more importantly the replayability of your game so let's get started supporting Sam the goals of sandbox design now design and art don't always see eye to eye uh art wants to make like an amazing player attack that has like three seconds of an 3 seconds of

anticipation while design once an attack that hits one frame after the player hits the button while to build a new IP bunge I really needed to know how to best support the goals of sandbox design and build enough trust to try and push the artistic set of Destiny's first person experience forward so we came up with a set of design directives for first person we called design pillars so this is my first talk that I'm I'm giving uh at GDC and you know when you're putting a talk like this together you want to sound really prepared and you want to sound like you know what you're doing right and so when I my in my first incarnation of this talk I was going to say yeah you know we made these design pillars and we made them at the beginning of the the project and then we just followed that and everything went super cool right and I gave this I gave this kind of a this this first talk to um one of our sandbox director and he's like he's like what are you doing he's like tell the truth and I was like all right so the

truth is we came up with these uh these pillars of first-person design like after the project was finished I sat down with it I'm like what do we what do we really do here what's important he's like okay yeah you know we did this and this and I'm like all right cool now for the next game we'll know so here are our pillars and you guys get them for free you don't have to go through the pain we went through so the first one is just immediate feedback from the player uh controller input and that just means like you hit a button and you get an action and if you think about it your brain's already told you what you want to do so if you hit if you hit the button you don't get an immediate response it feels wrong it feels like there's a disconnect between you and the game so we like the minute that uh that button gets pushed you want to start seeing motion on the screen like immediately secondly is the preservation of motion between actions it just means everything has to flow smoothly from one motion to the other and just we've we've gotten P the point where we can do a

motion it comes back to an idol and hits a wall and then you do another motion you need to be able to design animations that chain together effectively so the third one is the player should have visceral satisfaction from your animation now this this doesn't mean like oh make something cool make a cool reload this means think about the player think about each thing as a player experience and that means like if I'm going to make like a really cool melee or reload I need design I need design and sound and effects all on board because if we're all not working toward the same goal to toward the same player experience it's not going to be as good as it could be four is motion should serve to ground the player to the world now first person is really an interactive experience so it it or an immersive experience so you should really feel like uh it should feel physical there should feel like there's a body behind the camera and finally this is one that I

thought was really interesting and it didn't come on until very late at least my true understanding of it which is no speed bumps and that just means we don't want to take control away from the player or slow them down in the sandbox as much as possible and like an analogy of that is like you're you've got a really fast car you've been given like a Ferrari the last thing you want to do is go over a speed bump you want to be on a straightaway that car is meant to be driven fast so drive it fast so this is the last time I'm going to assault you guys with a wall of Tex I promise so but I will be uh mentioning some of these things you know as the talk goes on but I boiled them down to like two main principles and one is support fast fun responsive gameplay and two make it feel like a body your body is behind the camera make it feel physical now this is this is the hard part because trying to do both of these both of these things at the same time can sometimes seem impossible but there's where the challenge and the fun comes in sort of

so let's move on to now now that we've talked about design principles and what we want to do and how we want to do it let's talk about how to make first person content that feels good well what does feels good mean well first I mean we've gotten some information already we want to support first person that supports this fast fun and responsive gameplay and we want to make it feel like there's a body behind the camera something that feels physical but like the last thing the last piece of information is don't get in the way of the players's gameplay experience don't get in the way of their fun your content is not more in fun is not more important than the player's fun and that's one of the main things to remember about making first person animation so this is what Destiny looks like without any firstperson animation and this is the same player presets everything exact EXA exactly the same except you're not getting the visual feedback from first person and feels like you're just kind

of a floating camera uh inhabiting the world it doesn't feel like like there's any person behind the screen so we we want to change that we want to like start drawing you into our world so the first thing we need to do before we even start animating is we need a character so let's just look at Bungie's player character now our bu our player character is actually two players in one or two characters in one the first one is the third person player which you you know see when you're when your buddy IES are running around you see them in in the open world or you see yourself when you do like a a super animation uh and the first then we have the first person player which is derived from the third person player and that's just your arms a player camera a support object and a weapon and this is the stuff that you're going to actually see uh from your player view on your screen well when we put these together you have your actual player character so you have your your your first person arm and and

rig basically sitting on top of the the third person rig and we basically make all of the uh third person um geometry above the waist non-renderable from the first-person camera and because of that if you ever wondered like this is what the first person character what what your player character actually looks like that's why you can actually see the feed in a bungee game because you're actually viewing the third person animation set so now we got to character but where are we going to animate it like we need to understand like how to how to compose art on this kind of canvas which is your your screen your your TV or your monitor so let's talk about Bungie screen space so this is a view of uh of of Destiny's uh first person screen and it it looks a lot like a lot of uh you know first person shooters out there and as you can see it we basically have a a really good representation of

what's called onepoint perspective and that's basically these disappearing perspective lines all converging on one point uh in the screen so and that's in most first-person shooters that's like directly in the middle of the screen but Bungie does something a little bit different and we have since Halo 2 we're actually lowering the reticle and by doing that we're actually giving you this per this um uh like peripheral vision that or Vision that you're just kind of wear in in the peripheral of your vision that uh that actually kind of opens up the world it makes the world seem larger and more expansive and for me like I like if I even if I look out on you guys I see like this this box that I can that that I where I can actually see stuff very clearly but then there's all this other information like on the top and on the sides that I'm aware of but but is not perfectly clear in my vision so this actually makes I mean for me this this makes it feel like it's a little bit more of an immersive um

a real life view of of how you would be viewing you know a world so we have our screen space and we kind of know we kind of know like what it is and how to pose it on there so let's let's put a gun on there and basically like we'll go back to that one point perspective again and this this may seem like a very rudimentary thing to suggest but like with taking a little extra time to like actually pay attention to that onepoint perspective and find those disappearing lines and actually line up every single line on your weapon or first person character like so they converge toward that onepoint perspective it makes it actually feel like even though like these these two things are different like this Char like you have this this world that's being rendered and then you have this character that you're looking at it makes it feel like it's part of that world as opposed to like just window dressing that's sitting on top and by just taking that little extra step like it just makes it uh you're going to

actually build a foundation for your first- person animation that's just going to feel better more immersive and and right and i' I've done a lot of first person animation where I didn't take this step and there was always something just kind of missing from it and this is what it was so now we're going to start animating in first person and I thought it'd be interesting to actually show you what where this space that you're actually animating in so this is a represent of first person animation space and as you'll see it's a very small box it's very distorted by you know an extreme field of view and nothing matters outside of that box now that sounds actually pretty depressing but it's actually like again where where kind of the challenge comes in so now we've got this we've got this gun on screen we need to start adding something to it to actually give it some some

life so let's talk about adding animated overlays to your weapon so if we just got the gun on this on the screen this is what it's going to look like these are just base animations so it's a little better than having no no first person on there at all but still it just looks like a piece of geometry sticking out of your screen it's like it's not giving me any feeling of physicality or connection to the world well like this is a problem and I I really wanted to solve this for and so I kind of went looking for like where can I get information from from our game to actually start plugging back into our into our first person animations and it was really obvious like these this third person player was actually giving us all the information we really needed it was giving us pitch it was giving us yaw it was giving us this directionality speed everything that I that I might want to like actually you know bring into first person to actually give it that feeling of physicality to drive these overlay animations

so I made these animations like these these look poses these jump animation overlays and these lands and I started plugging all these animations into the first person and this is what it looks like again just base animations only just kind of the gun just kind of statically static sticking out of the screen and now we'll see the bass animations with the animated overlays now it's starting to feel like a little bit more physical it's starting to feel reactive and that's what I want that I want like every time you move that controller around every time you you push that jump button or land I want you to feel like you're actually in the game like it's actually you're actually behind that camera it's it I want it to feel physical and now it's starting to get there and this this by the way this this sounds simple but like it's one of those things that uh it it just took

forever because it's it's getting all these animations to all work together sometimes all at once and blending them off and on it was just like a really painstaking process so so now we're we're like half done so with with like getting getting the first person character kind of feeling right but now like we have to start animating things like actions like reloads and melees and all that stuff so before we start animating like I always think about like what's the most important thing in terms of Animation especially in games and for me it's like the first thing is posing before anything else like the poses have to read and they have to they have to feel right so I needed information like in in first person in that first person game space as to how to pose this stuff well we already have some information that we've gotten from the from the screen space that I talked about earli earlier we have this peripheral vision which isn't which is

this blue bar it's on the side and on the top and basically you don't want to you don't want to pose or or do any of your player actions or interaction in that space and the reason is it's it's Vision that you're aware of but it's but you're not actually focusing on if I had if there was something right here I could I could actually turn to look at it but because because we're in the first person uh first person shooter like you don't have the the option to do that so you want to make sure that you don't pose things in that in that area the second thing which is even more important is this red strip and I'm calling that the combat Corridor and I call it that because that's where your your your enemies are going to be coming from usually like right straight at at you or you're going to be coming at them you're going to be aiming your gun and you want to make sure that you don't block that under really under under a lot of circum most circumstances just because well I'll give you you guys an example like how many times have you

been playing a firstperson shooter and you're doing pretty well you go to reload your gun and all of a sudden you get killed like out of nowhere because you didn't see the guy in front of you because the reload was actually blocking your view like I hate that everybody hates that you're like you're actually your content is actually getting in the way of the players's fun or players experience so what other information can we get from posing well something else that I learned is that the eye travels radially around that reticle like around that aiming reticle and that is actually the most important you know space on on screen which is to basically like it's basically where your eye is always looking that little that little circle right there you're going to you're going to move your camera around or your your player around so you can view things in that particular space so and in that radius so how do you like actually support that radius with your

posing well it can be done really overtly like I did with this uh this warlock melee like the the thumb and the forefinger actually creating kind of like a a frame for this uh for this radius that we're looking around and in this way like not only can you support uh not only can you do like cool actions but but with within those actions you can actually frame like what the player is actually looking at so you're actually helping them look at this really important part of the screen and this can be done in less uh overt ways like this knife melee or even this uh this reload and it's just a way of like using your animation to focus the players's attention to where they already really want to look so that's two I I like to do three so there's one more that that I that I find is really important so in this grenade throw and in a lot of our actions will have this

uh this moment where you're actually like holding a you know a part of the body on the screen just for a moment maybe like you know like s to 10 frames or something like that and this is a grenade throw so if I was actually throwing something in real life I would be like throwing it and I would barely see my arm like come through my field of vision and then it would go off well because I'm you know I have this body awareness my my brain has told my body what to do and I'm aware of where my arm is all the time like I don't need to actually I don't need to see it but in first person really the the only information that you have about your character this body behind the screen is the visual information that we're giving so so why we kind of came up with the idea of just kind of like keeping that elbow on screen just just for a little bit longer because those poses are what is actually going to read to the player like there's only maybe three poses that or three three frames of Animation where it's actually going through the the screen this this elbow is actually

what's going to read and tell you what you actually just did so it's difficult to like continue to talk about animation without actually going into a real example so I want to talk about an animation that was was really hard for me to get right and one that ended up being really successful that people ended up liking so I want to talk about animating the knife melee so this is like the the knife melee that the the hunter class in in Destiny could use to stab people like as a melee and this is what it looks like so how do we do it well again let's start with like let's start with poses and and right now let's start with the the key poses and for you non-an animators out there like key poses are those main poses or those main pieces of information in in an animation that like

kind of describes the action so I can get pretty much the the entire timing of an action and what what that action is going to be by really defining my key poses so what are we starting well this is the idle pose and we don't want to start here because you're actually you actually already have an idle pose on screen so you don't need to you don't need to spend like these valuable frames like actually showing it again where I where I would actually start where I started with the knife melee was I started here and like that that pose that idle pose that I I showed you before that would actually in my timeline probably be on like frame -2 or something like that but this is the first frame of or starting pose of the animation there's a lot of information here so the first thing I'm doing is I'm I'm pulling this gun off screen I want to have that gun completely off screen by the by the time I you know by the time I've hit something and I want to do that because this animation is something that's going to be reused over all

weapon sets um and I and this and I'll talk to you more a little bit more about why we did that later but the second thing is I'm actually bringing up this this knife in a line of action like to go you know to go to the anticipation of the of of the animation so secondly it's frame three this is the anticipation pose now it used to be that bunge games uh all melees hit on frame three and that's just like because you can't that's how fra three frames is what it takes to really draw a line on screen from like to start from to to where you're going and actually like it was thought of as like that is law at bunge like that's what you do like it's it's a three frame melee um but we were able to kind of push this and push the physicality of this a little bit more those two frames we we're actually hitting on frame five those two frames like actually just gave it a little bit more more more

weight so frame five that's the hit pose so this in this Frame like we're actually going to going to hit right at the center of the targeting verticle and by doing this I'm actually breaking one of my own rules that I just talked to you about which is blocking that that combat Corridor but to really make a melee feel in first person really feel effective it has to actually hit through that that reticle that that contct contact Corridor and it has to has to almost like stay there just for just for a little bit to just to give people the idea that or the communication that they actually hit there next you know the the knife mainly has a has a hit and then it has a pull free so that that pull free is going to take about five frames including the OD shoot and then it's a moving hold for about seven frames and this is where I was talking to you guys about um those those poses that we keep on screen to kind of show you that extra extra bit of physicality or that that you actually done something this is that pose and for

me like I feel like this is one of the most important poses in the in the animation that you're going to do because it's probably the pose that people are going to most uh recognize or or see when when they're doing doing the action and finally like frame 25 this is the This Is Where It Starts transitioning off screen and basically like this is a that that moving hold to offscreen for about seven frames and for you animators out here this is what this animation actually looks like on the timeline so let's take a look at that all blocked out that looks pretty it it doesn't look it doesn't look great right now but I've actually got all the all the information that I need to like start building this into an animation that feels good in gameplay and also like kind of feels right physically so that that's that's the polished version of this

animation so there's one more piece to this this one more thing that's going to actually kind of up your game and kind of make it feel a little make this animation feel a little bit more physical and a little bit more immersive and that's that's the player camera and the camera is uh is one of those things that can actually be can be really cool it can kind of add that extra bit of physicality or it can be really destructive to your game and like I don't know if a lot of you if a lot of you have played games that that have made you motion sick or or you're or you get motion sick but like it's one of the reasons why you really have to be careful with camera animation because even if you're like even your camera motion is going to make only 10% of the population sick like if you're selling a million copies of your game well you've just like you've just lost 100,000 people that will put your game down never play it again and probably never play one of your sequels so it's definitely something that you have

to pay attention to now this this next clip I'm going to show you if you guys have any like if if you have any motion sickness you might want to look away but basically this is just a a head-mounted camera uh a GoPro on a guy's head just running straight down down a track running a straight line so this is actually where I started when I was kind of trying to figure out what the camera or what the eyes were doing what the camera was doing I was like oh okay I'll just animate that but you know I actually tried you know and I I've you know I had walk around like all the time with this GoPro camera and try and figure out what things look like from a first- person view and I quickly realized that it wasn't that's not actually how you see the world it's not it's not right and it's it's because we have as as human beings an image stabilization system like a lot of you know uh technology with cameras with

these new cameras that have image stabilization well we have like a biological version and that's called the vestibulo system and feel free to correct me I'm not a doctor so if I've gotten it wrong you can tell me after the after the talk but the vestibular system has two parts and one is the vestibular ocular reflex now this is basically a fancy way to say to basically say like if I'm looking at at you guys out here and turn my head my eyes are going to turn in the opposite direction of that turn to like keep my eyes focused on on what I want to look at and this do this happens very fast like it happens almost immediately um to like stabilize an image that you're trying to look at but your eye actually gets that information from the inner ear so the inner ear is like kind of an accelerometer it actually like as you as you move around and tilt around it actually tells uh your eye and your brain like what's actually happening so

as I as I move around like it it allows my eye to keep up and continue to look at that uh thing that's that's interesting to me that I'm looking at and like it it can be it's if you look at this picture right here of of May Floyd Mayweather it's a really good example he's doing and especially since we're talking about melees like he's punching this guy and he's it's a really violent action but his eyes are keeping up with the with the turn of his head and body and he's continuing to look at his Target which is exactly where his uh where his glove is hitting so like a really simple way of thinking about this stuff is balance equals alignment and that's like that feeling it's it's basically like the balance of seeing motion and feeling motion if you if if those things are in alignment then you're you're healthy that's you're it feels right and you and you feel in alignment but if you feel emotion and don't see it or if you see AEM motion and don't feel

it you're going to get motion sickness and a lot of you have probably felt that like if you're ever been sitting in the backseat of a car and you're and you read you're reading a lot of you might might have felt like that motion sickness and that's because your body is feeling the motion of the car but you're not actually you don't have any visual reference of that so your your eyes and your your inner ear are actually out of out of balance there and it's the same it's the inverse with games like if you're seeing a lot of motion on screen but you're not your body is not feeling it then it's also going to cause that motion sickness so a good way to so like what do I do with that like I I know that now so I know that that a lot of motion on camera or the wrong motion on camera is going to make me sick so I kind of wanted to see like like what motion was right so if you rotate a camera and I'm not talking about like if you're rotating your head but if you actually rotate a camera around it's going to create these large

motions in the world and on the horizon line and especially on objects far away um so and that and especially like camera roll in that way can be very disorienting it's like a lot of motion especially when you're talking about making motion for the C motion on top on the on the player camera um in like an open world so camera translation is actually kind of the opposite it creates like large motions up close and then it kind of like Trails off as it as it goes off into the distance so if you're look looking at L at a at a you know something up close like a player or an NPC or a combatant or just anything you're going to see that large motion but then in the world it's going to kind of Trail off after a little bit or it seems to so I kind of decided that in making camera animation for for these melees that I wanted to do it like with mostly translation and we do we did do a

little bit of like rotation on the on the camera to kind of mimic what was happening up close with that translation and kind of so we could see a little bit of movement in the distance but then uh because of some game optimization that we did kind of at the end of the project like those small decimals of numbers got stripped out so w w you know next game so so I I I know that I know I want to use translation but like I want more information of how to use this translation so in most of the in most actions and most violent actions like that you know that have intent like the head leads the action and that can actually be seen on the slow motion of this this boxer hitting this guy so if we really slow this down this pretty cool like when the when the box is setting up he's actually setting up like with his anticipation so as he sets

up here like his head's going to kind of go g to go to the left and actually uh anticipate with it then as he starts to throw it his head's actually going to lead that action or that that hit uh it's going to lead his arm and then as the boxer like is about to make contact uh with his Target and it's about to cross the center line of his body the head actually starts to kind of reverse that direction and go in the opposite go in the opposite way so and and this is just because like he's he's trying his body's trying to keep on on balance and so it's just kind of like his head's moving then his arm and then he then his then his head kind of starts to go in the other direction and then finally like as that head goes in the other direction it kind of like bof like does a little shake to kind of get back over the the center of the body and and maintain that Center of mass so he doesn't fall over so like a lot of times like this this

happens really like imperceptibly you don't don't see it except unless you look really close I had this really cool um uh like video of Mike Tyson doing this which and it was totally apparent but it was like VHS quality so I didn't figure you guys would want to see that so so here it is one more time so now I'm going to show you like the camera path that we that I kind of created um with that same principle on that knife melee oh so here's the slow motion version of that and as you can see like the the player camera is is going to actually lead the action you know into that into that hit and then lead the and then slightly lead the action on the pull out

and it it might just be like by one frame but it really makes a difference and as you can see there like basically I'm I'm creating a play like a grid inside Maya within the player within the first person view and I'm doing that because I want to um just see what's happening in my first person view while I you know do my camera animation and secondly you know I I actually showed you guys like the finished animation of the knife melee first and that's because I actually want to um I actually want to finish that animation and finish those arcs before I even start getting into the player camera and that's because I just want to concentrate on one thing at a time and I don't want the player uh camera animation to actually be destructive to the the animation itself and I just do that by basically finishing the animation and then putting all of the um player control Flags in camera space so as I move that camera around like uh the animation is isn't isn't affected and then at the very end I can start making slight uh like offsets to the camera and the

character so from first person this is what my final camera animation looks like and I'm not going crazy with it it's it's it's just enough to like make you feel like um that head is leading the action in the body you feel that physicality of the of the knife getting the knife hitting and then getting pulled out and then that motion uh trailing off so let's see like this motion kind of through the development and finally with camera animation all right so that was like a good representation of kind of how we develop like a emotion for first person like in for Destiny but like the final piece of this is how do you keep from killing yourself in

the process so why is there a plate of delicious waffles on the screen well there's actually a story behind this when I was working on uh a previous title Halo Reach um I had a producer come to me and say yeah so we've got this beta build at 6:00 in the morning that we're cutting and the designers want to change the timing of the grenade throw I was like okay and he's like so you need to you need to do that before this this date before 6 o'clock in the morning and I was like okay well it's 7 o'clock at night I guess I can do that um but unfortunately like it like in this game that we're making um each gun had its own unique grenade throw so it was like 22 guns in our in this in this thing so so then then there was like three different grenade throws on the third

person character so I had to like change 25 animations like before this date before this this uh this cut off time of 6:00 a.m. where we're going to send this beta in and like for some reason like he he said he said you know what I'm going to I'm going to make you a plate of waffles if you do this for me and for some reason like I thought that was a really good tradeoff and but really the the point of the whole story is the waffles are not worth it the waffles are not worth it um so this like really affected me um CU this was a really painful experience and so I wanted to figure out as we like move forward into this building this new IP like how I could figure out like not to do this anymore or not not to have this happen to anybody else so there was about there's three really cool things we came up with the first one is called an agnostic animation and this is basically just a non uh weapon specific animation and

these are these are these are animations that we shared over all weapon sets and uh they so basically like the the point is like we we made this animation we we authored it on the rifle pose and then basically like put put the hand in kind of a neutral pose the gun went off screen you do the grenade throw and then we use the ready animation to bring the uh the weapon back up um back back so it can fire again so just going to illustrate that here's the rocket launcher animation set and there was a grenade throw that kind of popped a little bit oh well but basically like that that that's that grenade throw was like used on everything it was used for the you know for the pist whether you're holding a pistol a rifle a machine gun or or a rocket launcher and by doing that like if a designer came to me then he said yeah I want you to change this this an you know and you've got this crazy deadline I'm like sure it's one

animation so instead of 25 which was great so this is basically how it looked when the whole with the whole thing together well well I guess you don't get you don't get to see that sorry here it is and it it it actually works it Blended pretty smoothly and I I actually wasn't sure about that cuz I wanted to actually get that kind of opposing action where you would you would see that throw and you would see kind of that pull of the arm so I was really concerned that we by not doing that we would kind of lose a little bit of physicality but but it worked like and and nobody complained so it didn't get away didn't get in the way of the player experience so it was actually successful and it it kept me from you know from many sleepless nights so the second one was animation scaling now I a lot of you animators out there

I'm sure like you you feel passion passionate about your work like you you spend a lot of time on an animation you want it be to be presented well well like we didn't have the budget to like just make animations at different speed like we needed to like we needed to like not only we were not only under a time crunch but we just didn't have the memory to make all these different reloads so so I made like I I made one reload and they're like yeah we're going to we're going to skap this up to like I don't know 150% I was like no that's my beautiful reload animation don't don't do it don't touch it they're like it'll be fine I was like oh my God this is this is going to be terrible but you know what it was actually fine like and actually people actually liked it they they like feeling that um that perk of seeing an animation that actually you know happens a little bit faster it actually like added to their visceral and and visceral experience the game and something they they enjoyed and I mean let's face it a Reload animation is a

punishment given to you by a designer it's like you fired your gun too many times you have to stop and reload this thing and wait until you can fire again so like yeah as an animator your your whole job is to basically like make that as as as seamless and palatable as possible by like making this pretty animation well the actual Act of speeding up that animation ended up making it something that was is even better and more palatable now this next one is something that um may seem boring to you but it was really exciting for me so I actually got brought into Bungie because on a as a contractor because uh the designers tried to were going to change the fov of the game and F fov is is short for field of view so if you have like a a a high field of view like you know in the 70s or something like that that means you have a wider aperture that you're you're actually being able to see the game and that's good for first person shooters

because you want to be able to see as much as possible while you're act you know of what's happening around you and a smaller number means a a narrower field of view so they were adjusting this slightly but even a small adjustment to field of view can actually start to affect like how like what's happening with your first-person content like they change it a little bit and you can start seeing inside of meshes or things start to you know Trav seem like they're getting smaller and and seem a little bit weaker so they brought me into because they were changing it and they they wanted me to basically reposition all the animations so they look good again well I knew that if they did that like when we were trying to make this giant new IP that it would be really painful because they're designers are always messing around with stuff and uh making artists lives miserable no I'm just kidding no that um they're I mean they they need to be able iterate and and change things as as much as as as we

do as artists so we did something that was actually pretty cool so the world camera um fov was 72 and the designers kind of were changing that back and forth like through the entire development of of Destiny but the FP arms and weapon fov was 77 and that that remained locked from the beginning of the project until the end because we figured out exactly where we wanted to to frame that weapon and where it looked the best and then we didn't want to change that so and so by doing this by actually splitting up uh the fov uh between these two elements we were able to keep our um we were able to keep moving forward with our with what we wanted to wanted to do as opposed to like doing all this busy work of readjusting our content based on uh experiments by Design and also alternately design was able to do this without being destructive to our work so it was actually an incredible time-saving uh thing that we

did so like besides the obvious like what do we get by not killing ourselves obviously we we don't kill ourselves but we get time and as game developers we're constantly fighting against the clock trying to make our deadlines but as artists like what you really need as an artist to make something good is you need time for experimentation and iteration and that's how you make a good product and that's that's what artists are really there for like that's and that's how to effectively use an artist is actually give them time to do this so if you can actually plan for you know things that are going to help this within your pre-production and production process it's actually going to help your end product make a uh make something that people are really going to respond to because the artist has had time to really polish it and make it as good as possible so what do we what do we talk about today like we talked about a lot of stuff we talked about design principles talked about the idol and the overlay

animations posing in first person talked about animating the knife the camera and finally how to keep from killing yourself but like really the main takeaway from this this talk is that Details Matter and it's it's worth waiting to get it right and this was a a quote from Steve Jobs that really resonated with me because like first person animation is something that you just see constantly in front of you all the time and uh like no matter like what your your schedule says like you if you wanted to if you want your game to feel good like it it has this is one element that you have to spend time on and I would say like that to you know lots of different disciplines within within games it it details do matter it's it's worth researching it's worth spending a little time to experiment and iterate on your content and make it feel as good as possible um and uh do we have sound um and finally like this is this is what

we got like by kind of by doing that by by kind of focusing on those details no sound so there's a lot of cool [Laughter] music oh oh well it's too late no worries no worries I promise you it's it's much better with the music so this is a lot of the the first person animation that we uh we ended up uh within destiny [Laughter]

so so thank you very much I I I really wanted I'm I'm thankful you guys came to to hear my talk I really wanted to give this because like even for me like this this stuff really isn't taught anywhere and I I wanted to like and unless you're like part of a studio that actually like is has a tradition of doing this type of Animation it's really hard to learn so I hope you guys got something out of it um and I'll take questions now if you guys like so you did the um you did the melee for the the hunter did you also do the throwing knife an yeah can you talk about how you made this thin little projectile feel like something physical like like I throw it and and I I feel that that thud when when it connects

can that's magic thank you so yeah yeah I can I can definitely talk about that um basically like I I mean everything kind of comes from from life so I would I would spend a lot of time like kind of trying do trying to do that motion seeing what it would would feel like and also seeing what it would would it look would look like from my from my vision and so I would kind of start there you know what I mean and obviously that timing is something that wouldn't work in game but like gave me some some reference to how how to actually do it uh and then it was basically like working with the designer to you know Define that timing in a in a way that would actually continue to still feel good to the player um and finally like I would actually I would animate that knife like leaving the hand and actually like spinning and traveling through space and then when so when I was working with the designer on this he actually took that um that path or that rotation and uh actually the knife itself like as you release it that's just a it's a prop object so that that

prop actually um we disappear that prop and then that becomes um an in-game object that actually or a projectile that goes toward the uh toward the target and by just kind of balancing like the timing and and those the the posing and physicality of that with with like kind of working with the designer to to get that to feel as good as possible like that's kind of how we did it and I think it's it's all about like kind of that one of those first principles I talked about which is to like work together like with with other disciplines to make make it feel good you know what I mean and like you can't do it in a in a vacuum it has to be like kind of a team effort so does that answer your question did you actually like the designer apply like Dynamic positioning for the rotation um I guess the question is like did the designer um add any um Dynamic rotation to the knife to kind of make it make it feel right and um to be honest like I I'm I'm not

exactly sure like you know and like there are there are certain points when you just like when you work together and you and then there are certain points where you hand off to somebody with a different skill set and uh and they kind of push it that extra mile so he that was Danny bullah he did a a great job um helping get that that one finished so yeah thank you hey I had a couple quote questions about the the knife melee the one uh you started started it like the first frame was already up and ready where was the knife on the frame before is the is the knife always present on the first person mesh on oh um actually we like spawn that knife like on that on the first frame really okay yeah and and I tried a bunch of different stuff like I I tried I was like well maybe we can use blending to make like kind of a smoother transition or or maybe you know like I want to start it start the hand off screen so it would be a little bit more believable but what I really found was like it's such a violent action that like H like bringing that knife like popping that knife up on screen like it

wasn't something that people like could read like visibly it just like oh you know it what what actually read was the idea of that Arc because it's only five frames from the you know point of the beginning of the animation to the hit so you have like an incredibly short amount of time and your eye actually can't usually track motion that fast so it was just like boom and you know people believed it so it was was good and that took a lot of experimentation I wasn't sure what was going to work so the the second thing was just probably real quick uh you that you stab and you actually held it for five frames um I see that there's a big effect hiding the the contact was there is that all there is or is there is the enemy actually playing a reaction to Anchor them to that stab um all the enemies play um like actual reactions to the to the stab as well as like effects uh you know making it feel like it's it's impactful and like it's like adding to that physicality but it's not it's not pinned

right it's not actually like no no not exact no and basically like we have like a you have a cone of effect you know going away from the character and I was actually really worried about that one because you're actually hitting this this point but it actually worked because as you as it because it starts up at the year right here as you come through it like this arm actually kind of uh takes up that whole cone so when it hits it actually feels it's it feels right and and the there's actually some adjustment of the player where the player will actually kind of suck to the uh to the combatant a little bit um if it's if you're if you're actually On Target when you activate the the knife melee cool thanks yeah thank you uh hi um so two questions one um in terms of the animation for first person and third person are those the same animations or do they go through some adjustments and the second question is just uh scheduling so how long did you have per animation per animation yeah like the the melee how long did you have

to work on that oh okay a day a year you know yeah um the uh uh the animations on the third person player were like also like they were we we thought of them as chunks like like the the first person reload and the third person reload were were basically an assignment handed out to to one person so like when I got a when I got this knife stab like I was responsible for the third person knife stab too and uh like they're actually separate animations so we try to um make sure that the timing is exactly the same on those on on usually like on those all those ke POS elements um but they're but they're separate um and like we usually do like I think like a first first person animations take a little bit longer to do like I would say you know that that knife stab on the on the third person character which was basically like from the from the waist up because it's a it's a replacement animation on top of

like a navigation set or an idle that would take maybe like a day like a first person animation like that just to get it right and because you know you're going back and forth with designers and you're putting it in play tests like I would say something like that like altogether might take you know like a week to get right or even longer you know like there are times when like those animations just kept coming back it's like wow uh one frame less one frame more I was like oh God so so yeah it's it's kind of I would say I mean I would say like yeah it takes takes a week but it's really like who knows you know what I mean it's like I would say like it it takes as long as it is it takes to get right so and producers don't like hear that but that's kind of the truth so thank you hi uh my question is about fov I know say that you use two different fovs for the first person weapon hands and

the world M um My worry is is that if you have some animation like maybe a little bit longer melee attack animation because the enemy and the weapons are rendered into different fovs their position on screen might be a bit off MH uh how do you deal with this problem or you feel is doesn't matter at all um I mean it it definitely does matter and and there def there there is that that problem um we were able to kind of like I I think when designers brought it down to to 72 the the world fov like we were definitely like looking at how that how that fov was affecting um the combatants and other players like when when you actually were to see to see melees or up close attacks like how that would actually affect the combat and I feel like they kind of um they they hit that threshold of like okay we can't go anymore otherwise it's going to start to start to break down so it was basically just kind of like look at it and and see

see if it was believable and then then you know do that there wasn't there wasn't as much science to it as as you might think it was just like that looks right okay cool let's move on so it's mostly like experimenting for the just right fov angle yeah definitely and like that that's like most of it is just kind of seeing what looks right seeing what feels right and then just doing that okay cool thank you thank you hey um I had a question to ask about the animation blending stuff for you know so in the overlay animations you were talking about like first person um like blending animations for like you know the movement stuff so could you describe a little of like how easy it was for you to kind of preview those Blends like you know adjusting them like did you have control over them basically over the um the those animations and how they Blended or yeah that kind of stuff um I mean I I had some control um based on like kind of some blending numbers that we were able to apply to specific animations um but yeah you know it

basically was kind of like you know I okay you know these two animations don't play well together so I have to blend this one off while this one Blends on you know at a certain point or but at least at least you had like full control wasn't like a designer had to um do it or yeah yeah that they the the designers are basically like well you just make it make it feel right you know and so yeah I would just sit at my desk you know constantly like looking at you know these looking at the look screens and looking at the you know jumps be like okay that's that's a little bit off or that's not playing well with this with this uh particular overlay and you know just make slight adjustments to the animation or the or the blend or the um the ramping on and off of the the animations so cool thank you yeah thank you I just had a quick question when animating the first P person uh player inside that camera frustrum with all the weird perspective and all that going on are there any tips or kind of techniques you used as far as preventing you know

the mesh penetration and clipping planes and all that kind of stuff um yeah I mean I I basically kind of like I mean I use that um kind of uh combat Corridor and peripheral vision thing and basically like I try and stay in those safe zones from from the standpoint of uh that planer View and then from like the the standpoint of like how the depth of that uh that area I just kind of try and keep in mind that um when I'm doing an action or or putting anything on screen in first person that the farther away I I get an element away from the camera the smaller it's going to be and when you get it when you get an element farther away from a camera and it gets smaller it feels weaker and then if it gets closer in fact when it gets too close then it starts to feel claustrophobic so just trying to like kind of find the um uh find it with within there or find find the best kind of depth is really important um and I'd say like that's that's kind of that's kind of the guide that I use

so you used a combination of kind of a exaggerated poses and kind of more close poses in order to kind of tweak the scale of the objects with the animation yeah I mean and and it's not like me like saying oh yeah you know you should do it this way and in fact all this stuff it's like this is this is like this is what what I tried and what seemed to work you know and and even like the camera rotation it's like well yeah just be aware of like what that does not saying not to do it um but yeah it's just it's basically just kind of experimentation and first person you know if you interview first person animators are still left out there um it's I mean you know it's just all kind of about feel like you you put something in there you experiment with it and sometimes it feels right and sometimes it feels right in Maya or in your in 3D Studio Max and then you get it in game and it just completely falls apart and I'm not even sure why sometimes but that seems to be kind of the way so it's just basically I'd say just develop a workflow that um that where you're

continually getting content in game and actually testing it in game that's the best way to go thank you thank you so that grenade thing kind of sound like a nightmare when you came up on the what's that the uh refactoring all the grenade animation sound like a nightmare so I was wondering if you could have maybe separated the two arms on different tracks so you could have just done the throw on different timing and then give that to the designers like as they wanted it and then spend more time to get what you actually wanted on like the right hand with the the weapons is something like that do you think it's possible yeah in fact I was actually like I really wanted to do that I wanted to like actually separate the rig so like I could do something on the the left on the left hand do something else on the right hand or you know and kind of mix and match and put those together that would have like saved a lot of time and effort but it also um required a lot of engineering work and a lot of work that was outside my department and um uh it's just one of those things that we didn't we just didn't get to or we didn't get to early enough in the

development process to actually make it effective but I mean yeah it's a it's a brilliant idea and we we definitely want to try stuff like that in the future so well the agnostic idea seem like a a good solution as well seem to be cool to blend those two so yeah yeah yeah thank you yeah like I said I wasn't sure if it was going to work and yeah great yeah thanks thank you anyone else well thank you very much for coming I'll be around for a little bit if you and you guys would't ask me any more questions thank you