Archive for June, 2006

Perhaps even more depressing than Bad Walkcycle #08, Billy No-Mates, here we find our unlucky antichrist walking with the sombre mood of one who has just found out he slept through judgement day. Looking more like the last two steps before a suicidal bridge jump than an actual walk, this devil certainly makes the alsoran cry.

Last week the alsoran gave his first public speaking presentation outside of his weekly team meeting, which is a precursor to a planned GDC talk once his current project is complete. Due to confidentiality and the proprietary nature of several of the systems overviewed, the presentation remained fairly high level, only touching on technical issues in the Q&A session that followed.

Perhaps the biggest thing to take home from the event was a re-affirmation of the belief that sharing knowledge is one of the strongest avenues with which to further the industry as a whole. The second most important insight was that there is a real camaraderie between developers of different studios, while still remaining competetive enough to push harder for their own projects - something that continues to push innovation.

Retro-active knowledge sharing (in post-mortems etc.) should allow us to avoid making the same mistakes over and over while game development still persues the establishment of its internal language, but for now any release to share techniques is greatly appreciated.

Like so many examples on these pages, this dull-as-shit effort was accompanied by a helpful tutorial, probably entitled “How To Make Dull-As-Shit Walkcycles”. It is certainly worth sharing knowledge when you have such a vast array at your disposal, such as backwards oscillating arms and feet that travel in a bilinear horizontal motion.

This rather hard-edged fellow of the James Dean persuasion would likely cover a lot more distance if his arms weren’t bound by puppet-like IK, giving his hands a weightless jerkiness that counters the vertical movement of the body. There’s a repeating theme here.

The alsoran and his colleagues have spent a lot of time on his current project pondering the supposed Uncanny Valley, a theory put forward by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori that the more humanlike robots became, the more people are able to emphasise with them, seeing them in a human light. Paradoxically however, the closer they come to looking lifelike, the more we notice little mistakes due to each viewer having a lifetime’s experience analysing faces, to the point where the viewer is repelled by errors, finding them disgusting and creepy.

This has often been quoted as the reason why Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was less accepted than the later Advent Children. Where the former tried to take on the awesome challenge of reproducing humanlike characters, the latter opted for a more familiar anime look, where the CG character actually come off looking much more convincing than their realistic elder siblings.

As we move closer to realistic game characters, we run the risk of falling into the Uncanny Valley. While this may seem like a way off in the future we now have proof that this is a real issue. At this years E3, the alsoran witnessed the PS3 demo of Heavy Rain from our old friends at French development studio Quantic Dream.

A victim of its own success, the sheer detail of the lighting and character model, based on actress Aurelie Bancilhon, leaves every single animation mistake plainly visible. Eyes that lazily move with the head, facial rigging that would be unacceptable in a student project, and lip-sycing that suggests the dialogue was initially recorded in Quantic’s native tongue all combine to produce one of the biggest warning signs to videogame animators everywhere. That as we move into the realms of more believable characters, we cannot afford to drop the ball on any element of our craft, be it modelling, lighting, rigging or animation.

Despite leaning towards the alsoran’s vision of the future of game animation, this experiment with procedural animation is enough to persuade even the hardiest technical animator that the fight just isn’t worth it. When AI takes over movement behaviours that have surely been input by a programmer, this is the result - two competing flatulent schoolboys.