The Best Animation Tricks of the Trade (For 2016)

[Music] hey everyone my name is Alex Leman I'm an art director at riot games and welcome to the first ever tricks of the trade talk uh as I said I work at Riot games I get to work on League of Legends which is amazing um in my career as an animator I worked anywhere from commercials to feature film and now on games and I'm going to be your host today um left and right of me you see an amazing panel of animators and they're going to share tricks that really made a difference in their career and the goal is that these tricks are applicable to your work tomorrow you know you can go home and immediately try them out so what is the tricks of the trade talk all about um you know I always wanted to have a talk that's full of these nuggets you know where you just come to the talk and you get like all these wonderful nuggets that you can try out the next day because we as an industry are a pretty young industry games in general is a couple of decades old right and animation in games is even younger um you know and we're all still learning you know we're sharing all this information

and we thought hey you know what by us sharing our tricks hopefully you will share your tricks with us and you know then we get some really cool tricks that we can take home too so if you have a good trick afterwards please approach us and let us know about it and then as an industry as a whole we hopefully turn into this awesome animation Beast that we can be okay cool how does it work well simple six panelists right each of us is going to present three tricks and that means for the sake of time we really got to book it okay so for you uh here couple of tricks to get the most out of it um you know don't worry about taking notes just enjoy the ride if you uh want to look back just go to the GDC Vault and then you can phrase frame by frame it and with that being said I'm going to start this off with our first three tricks my career so uh when I started out and and switched from feature film to game animation I wish I had known this one um this is how I did one of my first animations uh so this a character Z in the game League of Legends and I started

out in a pose a and I hit my my hit frame pose B and I go back into a and sure enough this is boring Bland repetitive and um but I I see it time and again in a lot of games um that you know people do this it's actually pretty easy to fix all you have to do is you have to find your C now C is actually this one pose where you st whether you tell the story of the character C is what makes this character completely unique how heavy was the punch how high was the jump um this is this is actually pretty easy to find out and here we see it in action so um both of these uh Loops are 45 frames long so they have the same length and on the left side you see a very repetitive blend uh between a b and a um on the right side you see the ABCA and this is unique this is Zed only Zed is attacking this way in our game and it makes it really easy for us to find uh character in the uh in the animation so the next time you work on a loop find you

see um responsive animations working on a game like League of Legends means that the moment a player hits a button you immediately want a reaction on the screen so how do you do that I want to share two small tricks for that the first one is that I learned you don't need a long blend like my first Blends were like 7 10 12 frames didn't work out it's not fun uh actually I will show a a two-frame blend in a second and so if you are starting out in game animation you know uh feel free to cut into your ations um you'll you'll be surprised what you can get away with the second one is something that at first made no sense when I learned it and that is that we put the anticipation at the end of the cycle so uh this is how it works uh the player hits the button immediately we fire off the arrow and then the anticipation to put up a new Arrow now this is what happens in the player's mind the player sees oh you put up a new Arrow while guess next time you can fire it off immediately it has actually mind trick that works really well let's look at that in animation uh in in motion so

here's my two-frame blend and the anticipation is at the end see it again there's the two-frame blend and then the anticipation is at the end so the next time you have to work on a very repetitive animation uh not repetitive a very responsive animation I highly recommend that you try it out to put the anticipation at the end and you see what you can get away with okay trick number three uh I was working on howling Abyss which is a map in our game and I had to animate these simulated uh These Chains so I started uh simulating them because they were falling down into the abyss uh pretty complicated stuff and that leads to very uh dense motion data this works by the way also for motion capture the problem is that this doesn't Loop uh right you can the first frame the last frame are not the same so what do you do about it well there are there's something that's called animation layers in pretty much every piece of software but most of us use Maya where you take all the controls

and you set a key on frame number one and you middle Mouse drag it to the last frame and you set another key if you do that then over time Maya will blend into its own pose again uh let's look at that in motion here we go so on the left side you see the simulated Loop that came out of you know simulation and there's clearly a hitch on the right side you see it Blends into itself this took me about 30 seconds um so next time you have to deal with motion capture data or dense animation data and you want to Loop it use animation layers okay with that being said those were my first three tricks and I'm handing it out to over to Simon anger is told here all right hey everybody I'm Simon I am from Phoenix Labs uh so for my first one I want to talk about force uh so often in animation reviews we hear things like uh an animation doesn't have enough weight it's not powerful enough um instead I

find it easier to talk about uh force and inertia a character doesn't change direction uh if they don't apply force in the opposite direction um for example uh a character here a foot contacting the ground um pushes up through the legs Alters the uh rotation of the hips the spine the arms legs it all kind of works down from there um if you watch this clip H plays awesome uh watch how the center of mass is being redirected when the legs come out in front of it apply force in the opp Opposite Direction and uh influence its inertia um if you think about how your current gameplay character works it likely doesn't uh happen this way this same thing can be applied to lifting a heavy object or a light object um the amount of force being uh applied in a specific Direction implies weight uh we know from this image the boxes are light because nothing in his pose is really communicating force or or anything being applied to oppose gravity uh broken lines of action like this sort of

communicate relaxed muscles and very little effort on the other hand showing extreme weight uh requires communicating a lot of force being exerted uh all these lines of actions are support those opposing forces keeping this in mind when uh when animating or even just providing feedback and throw that into your language and into your toolkit um my second one uh use metrics for Focus iteration no matter how big your animation team is it's always a challenge to figure out how to use your development time effectively uh when you're planning to focus your animation work and where your team's going to work um letting data do a lot of that leg work for you uh getting metrics on which animations get played a lot or a little uh in entirety or not at all uh It's Quickly going to generate a priority list for you on your team um a lot of times the 8020 principle applies here 20% of your animations get seen 80% of the time um make that 20% off awesome uh

and it'll significantly improve the perceived Fidelity of your stuff the other 80% shouldn't be crap but uh if you only have a limited time for polish that 20% is where you really want to go um uh this is also handy when you're retargeting or reusing animation sets for different characters such as reusing a male set for a female set typically you can get away with replacing only about 20% of that and you will have a female set or an injured set or whatever um if you don't have access to metrics or the program programming help to mine those uh there are analog ways to do this uh try filming people playing your game um making note of which animations get played the most and which ones you rarely see how people are interacting with your game uh and pick out the most commonly played moves uh another method is to think of your game in conset tric rings uh in the center of that is the the Target or core of your game uh does the player need to capture the flag and return it to the base then running and capturing the flag is your 20% um the opposite side of that defensive moves

attached to that are probably live in that but player celebrations when they Capture the Flag probably live outside of that and don't need his much polish um this also applies to other areas of the game U uh UI oops ah stop um oh no what happened sorry it's not going back there we go um this also applies to other areas like uh audio you uh affects everything all the stuff attached to that core the wind condition the target of your game those that 20% needs to be polished to a te everything else you can spend a little bit less time on uh number three head movement is more important than hip movement um most character rigs use the hips as a top node controller well for subtle moves this is okay uh broader stuff this creates a very strange ful point for your character uh this becomes worse in games we use a ground node for a lot of times blending for characters and that Point becomes even more exaggerated uh

you can see this in action here when my video stops I think that's load is it loading how about Christians talk there it goes um oh no it skipped it there you go my video is too big can I click it no there we go uh so here you can see in action character change in Direction you can see where that folen Point's being applied on the ground we're getting that erratic sort of head movement um most living things have evolved a very complex chain of stabilizing mechanisms to uh stabilize eyesight for flight fight ORF flight situations we are sort of in a sideways uh way used to seeing things move that way when any breaks that we dip really

sharply into uh The Uncanny Valley so if you think of anytime you've seen maybe a crowd character change direction sharply or a CG character in a film suddenly realized that it was very CG chances are some erratic head movement was was a part of that um a great example of a step in the right direction uh this little clip that was on Twitch from Paragon uh you can see how they're sort of getting that the legs out and trying to change that inertia keeping the head kind of very steady again sort of combining that use of force and steady head movement um and next oh no I have one more slide uh so place a higher priority on that track your arcs track your head um and how you blend between animations because uh ultimately our goal as animators is to make the character look like it moved not let it was moved right and next we have Amy [Music] [Applause] hello I'm going to try to make this as

quick as possible so I'm probably going to read um so I've been in an animator for 21 years now uh working starting off in uh future film on 2D animated films and now I'm in gaming and fully enjoying it um so let me move on here we go uh so being asked to like you know bring in what I think about when I'm animating uh a lot of the things that I I bring in is obviously from the 2D background uh these examples right now uh this smears uh help show the illusion of motion and I find that like you know sometimes you get into a point where you get strobing or staggering uh how do we bring this into 3D so smears and M multiples Bridge the G Bridge the space between the gaps of slower frame rates uh without them the viewer sees empty spaces that cause strobing during playback this helps maintain fluidity even though it breaks the volume of the

character so next slide breaking it again now here is real time so you might say to yourself okay so how does this apply to realistic characters much more than you think uh biology allows for some drastic adaptations to movement needed in the most intense situations be them repetitive or immediate working with limited or complex rigs we can get stifled with maintaining the beauty of the mesh perfect poses and lack of deformation equals uncanny valley sloppy is sometimes better like a moving hold even though most even the most subtle irregularity adds life Embrace adapting your keys to the motion you're creating or your animation can be stiff all right let's move on there we go here is an example of breaking it in in real time the pulling that uh character around now this is all handkey animation but it's applied in the 3 sense so you see really a lot of

that pulling and pushing and stretching uh it really lends itself to the feeling of the motion if I did not include this it would still you'd still have the impact moment you'd still have some of the weight but this really just makes makes it read better and it's in some instances it really it makes it more enjoyable to see okay so tip number two keeping track of arcs okay so this is really quick and dirty in Maya um it's the edible motion Trail uh whenever I do walk Cycles or Run cycles I have a tendency to really do the contraposto poses during passing so I really get that hip and and shoulder axis moving around uh that has a tendency to uh this this technique will show me whether or not my head's bobbling too much really quickly and I can also show me the subtlety of where things are are going a little bit off track all right next

again uh edible motion Trails uh just to keep really quickly uh to look at the arcs of motion in action like a sword swipe or uh or just general movement arcs in arms legs and planting motions so these these can be Memory Hogs uh I suggest you turn everything off when when you're working with them sometimes you can also turn the key frames so that you don't see the actual key frames being marked on the line like in this example uh just to keep your memory going but it's it's a quick check method that I use that's not really dependent on making anything specific so lastly um I've got a simple Block in and layer example so to just bring it down to a simple level I I just use a cape so basically I'm going through and I'm setting key frames uh about four key frames on this uh just to get the idea of the base Motion in one axis uh then what I do is I select see here here there we go then I select the

lower bones and just for a quick Block in technique I just drag those uh those key frames down the timeline to offset them and voila you've got a little bit of instant overlap um I find that this is again this is really for the Block in process so to add a little bit more more complexity to that base movement I go into layers and I just basically select the bones on each line on the each edge of the of the cape and just adjust them again using two middle frames just pulling those around to make that cupping shape and then I move on to do the next I do another key frame to kind of pull that fluff up at the end create that shape a little slow and then

voila you've got overlap and follow through and this takes this block in it took just under four minutes to do so really quick way of running through and doing overlap and follow through this can also be applied to other chains that have major overlap and follow through it just doesn't doesn't have to be just a cape so another thing is when you're going through layers uh like in this especially in this method uh you use a Smart bake because otherwise it'll bake everything but uh other than that that should be it yes so That's all [Applause] [Music] folks all right hello everybody I am an animator at ilm my name is JD been there for 12 years and these are my tips that you will hopefully like so first off as we deal a lot with CG shots and life action shots um handheld camera stuff is

very important so in order to be consistent with life action shots and CG shots you want to add um hiccups and and handheld and just imperfections in your cameras and for that I have a very simple thing so you have your camera setup that could be layers or however you want to do it with nodes and usually I do six or eight or 12 uh every six to eight or 12 frames um athetic key on the X and Y rotation channels and then you do separate rotations so X and Y are different then you take the yre rotation move it over by three frames and then you have an organic overlap so that the Peaks are not on the same frame you do that and then you can have um you know if you have a static camera get a bit more wavy a bit more exaggerated a bit more subtle you can put that in layers for shake you can give it some flavor if you have a car drive by for imperfections on the rumbling on the car um or if you do something on a bigger shot you can do full and handheld for POV stuff um you can go into action mode

if it's a camera track to a chopper or just general handheld just keep it a bit alive and not so CG second one is blur so a lot of times live action we have a lot of crazy action shots where stuff is always moving all the time it's very confusing gets uh gets a new nerves so what you can do is you can artificially slow down certain elements where you can say at this point I want to see the face a bit better so on the left always moving always blurry on the right I slowed it down just a bit here for the guy's eyes and you can do this on fangs on claws on facial expressions anything that's a specific story Point uh or emotion and that way you can guide the audience and tell them now you saw this this is important and now we can move on next one is acted out sounded out that's for me as a general reference point when I uh want to check the timing of my animation so if I do a play blast I act out what I see in the play blast

exactly what I see not what I think it should be doing but what you exactly see so if it's something too slow or too fast you will feel it it will feel wrong but it's a bit tricky because you might have creatures might have a dragon and something that flies around so you can't really do it so a lot of times I just sound it out so you can have a guy that trips and falls so you just do over and over and over you sound like an idiot but you do it over and over and over you have that reference timing in your ear you do your play blast you make that sound you check it with your play blast if it's off you're wrong or you record yourself put that into Maya and then reference that sound file as a like a general uh guide for [Music] reference or you can use music so whatever you want uh will be okay so next up that's Billy thank you very much [Applause]

[Music] [Applause] playing awesome that's me and guys you got to you got to forgive me because I am freaking out this is so cool like look at this panel look at the fact that this is happening and I'm just I don't know what I don't know what to think so um all right so we're just going to jump right into it um trick number one simple retargeting uh so there's lots of times in map where you you get the data and you have to wait for it to be processed wait for it to be retargeted um and uh at Sucker Punch we we always try to get stuff from the volume into the game as quickly as possible and so a lot of our a lot of the uh the methods uh surround that um so I found that you can actually go and take your animation um and just take the Moab data and then pick a one or two frames where the registration points happen for different characters different sizes and that actually will

retarget the animation very effectively let's see is it going to play automatically awesome so here is just normal normal proportion character superhuman character and just going through finding the key registration points posing out the character on a different layer And Then There It Is retargeted cool um so here's another uh thing for for cleaning up data uh I don't know if anybody here is familiar with marai it's a old school yeah all two of you that's awesome um so I'm kind of like a I'm an old school guy so uh one thing that Mariah did really well was it actually had the ability for you to plot out your motion um and then just attach ik to that and and do the clean up through the curves themselves I

know that there's the the the the motion the the motion trails that you can use editable motion Trails this is a trick with uh motion paths which is uh a bit more uh responsive and all that I'm doing is I'm taking the the animation that had a had a hitch in it and going through and attaching a curve on uh attaching a CV on each of the key frame key frames and then attaching my AK to that curve and setting a key on each of the frames on the motion path itself and then from there it's really quick and responsive to go through and just clean everything up in three uh 3D along the the the path itself uh and another another method like another thing that this is really good for is if we have multiple characters um multiple people that are acting on a map stage and we want to make sure that they stay attached properly and the the data is

like dense data that comes in uh from the stage it's really easy to clean it up really uh very quickly using this method as well and you just get rid of the curve and now it's cleaned up all right last one um fresh eyes everybody you know you you want to get critiques you want other people to look at your stuff and the main reason for that is is it's a it's a fresh look like you're looking at something looping over and over and over again and you kind of like lose you know objectivity uh and it gets a little stale so what you can do is um one thing I like to do to kind of see the animation with with fresh eyes myself is just play blast uh play blast it backwards and watch your animation in Reverse um another trick is in in Maya just hit the seven key so the lights all go out and just at the silhouette of of your character uh you

combine both of these and you really uh get some get get some good results uh and um it's kind of like a neat cheap way of of uh getting fresh eyes on it now I will hand over staged to [Applause] [Music] Jay hey guys I'm Jay hosfelt a lead animator at epic games uh currently working on Paragon and and we are hiring animator so find me for a business card sorry all right so um I've been working in games for about 20 years so a couple of my tips kind of deal with how animation integrates into games so first tip is um so Brad Clark from rigging Dojo showed me this it's it's an amazing technique to pull out animation from dense data whether it's map or it's just baked down animation for whatever reason um and so in the past I would take one of these animations and just start deleting Keys the keys I felt I didn't

need and then you kind of end up with this this manageable key framy uh animation system so what you do here is you set a new layer uh with all your controls set it to override set that weight down to zero so you see what your first layer is doing and with all your controls selected just go through and key the poses you want like the contact points um some of your key poses then if you go back set that layer back to 2 one and you can see the new keys you set on that top override layer you can now see the new animation you created based off that DSE data or that map data and so you can sit there and go back and forth and rinse and repeat and kind of fine-tune this animation and the whole time you have that untouched map or DSE data on your your base layer to always reference uh so this drastically changed our Pipeline on our project we use this a lot and so here I'm going back you know

making adjustments cuz that first part looked a little swimmy and this can be used on blending to new animations you bring in new animations on layer zero all right so next tip is so on Paragon in many games in the past we've had a restriction of you know melee moves or reloads need to be like upper body only like start at spine one but what this does is it really separate spine one from the hips and it looks pretty ugly but it works for you know gameplay design it makes it responsive um but I didn't want to settle for this on Paragon so I was looking at what anom what we had in the anom set and we had the straf like a lot of games have the run right run left run forward run back so I took those same assets didn't have to create new ones and we just put a offset hold on let me hit play here so if you see the video on the right I'm

using those same four animations but I'm using the root rotation to offset it so that way all four straights actually still keep him running in the same direction it's very hard to see it's very swimmy okay can you guys tell what's going on so same for strafe animations but now you can see his hips have the ability to swivel right and left even though he's running the same direction and so combine that with the upper body animations for swings and you can see here now the hips play a little nicer with the the upper body so and of course you can go on and add additive and whatever to to uh make this even better but it's just a cool kind of cheap technique to make that feel a little better and trick number three so this is something I've seen uh new animators when they come in and start working on games you know they're told by programmers like hey your animations they're running forward you need to have them run in place and I've seen uh exporters and or animators just straight up delete that forward motion

curve and so they end up with something like this and it looks correct it's running in place run looks good it Loops whatever um but that's actually incorrect what you want to do is here's this Forward Motion curve it looks like a linear straight path um but it's really not uh so what you do is you subtract what the game is going to add to it which you know linear distance over time uh you could put that on a layer or put it on an offset node and and what you'll see is once you subtract that you actually still have some nice forward and back motion on your your hips and it adds that texture to the Run forward motion and it helps your characters not feel so linear when they're running forward and you get that nice natural motion it works even better on characters at limp or might have like a kind of a stutter in their step and that's going to pass it back to Alex [Applause] like I like I said this is the first

time we've ever done this and this is also the first time we ever stayed under 30 minutes that means we have one more minute to run through some speed tips because there were some tips that we had that we couldn't fit into the talk these were 18 so far so we're going to try that by the way if you like this format if you think this is a really good idea please vote for it or give us feedback let us know what was good what was bad about it and we'll think about it if we ever bring this back but speed round okay some crazy tricks that uh didn't make it into the talk uh speed one I learned this from an animator at DreamWorks it blew my mind body language 8 out of 10 times precedes vo okay study some video reference you will see that people shake their head before they say no or they nod and before they say yes whereas animators most of the time animate that at the same time speed tip number two who's next Simon quick uh so we seen a lot about uh motion Trails tracking arcs and stuff sometimes those are really heavy cumbersome to scene I like to sometimes just throw Just A straight piece of geometry in the scene to use as reference especially if you're trying to

get uh track compound arcs like an arm swinging a hammer you can track the elbow the arm and everything along like a circle attached to the character and uh using that to unify arcs so even even if you have an Anam picker or a guy sometimes it's faster to just do a hot key press and release for me I'm L Lefty it's on G on my pinky so its nerves control is on off to quickly see the controller select them adjust the pose and move on okay bone chains uh usually bone chains seem like for dangly bits cloth ponytails whatever uh bones equal distant uh you can get just as good of effect if not better from using like the golden ratio spacing of the bones because as you can see on that chain reference a lot of the cool curvature happens at the tip speed to number five put it in the game don't spend too much time in Maya put it in the game please please put it in the game um learn to code I'm not saying become a

programmer but just learning a few uh quick scripts some things like Python's probably been the most valuable thing I've learned in the last year uh start with something simple uh and like I tried to solve uh moving animation from a selected object onto a locator and back again and then just move on to more complex things um yes tracking arcs a got two Drive uh Drive erase markers one color and you track every frame the control of the nose the hand or whatever and you can see what's wrong where is a pop take the second controller retrace it where it's supposed to be reanimate it and if it's not your screen even better okay sometimes you want to bring in an animation from another file to preview or look at reference in your file and rather than import a heavy rig just uh export out a limic GPU cache of the animation scene bring it into your file and you can spin around it uh speed tip number nine rotoscoping is not a bad word it's actually a really good great tool to learn complex body motion this is a 13-second animation that took me 8 hours and I learned a

ton doing it so next time just try something out if you're student try rotoscope something don't put it on your real but learn a lot from it so the six six to eight frames at the very beginning of the shot is when uh an audience will understand your shot it will understand the characters in geography and everything so don't put anything fast for the first six to eight frames it's confusing same thing at the end during the last six or eight frames add anything fast it's confusing because we're expecting a resolution to that beginning and there is none awesome this is a crazy one uh for any lead out there it's not about whether you like something it's about whether it actually is makes sense if it fits if it's quality so we always say we don't need to like anything I don't like the color purple this is a perfect room for Lulu our character in our game because she likes purple so uh I as an art director don't need to like it if it actually fits the the game then it is correct last one uh so contrast so when you do

it's a simple thing just to make it more organic and less CG if you if I grab this mic let pretend that's 15 frames from my hand from here to here don't do 15 15 do 15 12 1510 just always make it different also don't go from pose a to pose B back to pose a you go A to B to C so it's always different always different timing different positions makes it more real more organic and that's it woo okay [Applause] thank you all so much for sticking with us if you guys have Great Tricks let us hear about it give us feedback whether this format works and whether you gained something out of it thank you [Music]