I’m playing through Braid again after the initial realisation that years of hand-holding in 3D have softened my platforming and puzzle-solving skills, and took a trip over to the portfolio site of David Hellman, artist behind the beautiful painterly worlds. While not earth-shattering, the animation does fit the unsettling Czechoslovakian fairytale stop-motion aesthetic perfectly, (especially the  expressionless goombas that wander the levels – creatures that could have been lifted right out of my childhood nightmares).

Beyond examples of animated gifs like the one included here, you can download Photoshop PSDs of all the character animations in the game from this handy location. Certainly worth a look to get an idea of the animation process behind this wonderfully frutrating little game.

Valve have posted the slides of Mike Booth’s recent Stanford AIIDE-09 conference presentation. While only the first section on path-finding will likely be of most interest to animators, he also goes some way to breaking down the famed AI Director used to dynamically tailor the game experience for each new playthrough.

They certainly give the outward impression at least that they’ve attained the developer holy grail of sharing technology across projects, recently announcing early Bots for Team Fortress 2 using the same decision-making as described in this paper. Find a list of all of Valve’s speaker presentations here.

I’m currently playing through this one on my new PS3 slim and must say that of all the unique features Little Big Planet has, the puppet-like emoting is the most fun I’ve had in ages. Here’s a little bit of info on the animation in (I believe the incoming PSP version of) the game.

Looks like a simple rig in Maya to compliment the game nicely, and they use morph shapes for the facial emotes which seems a natural fit given the squashiness of the character.

Still with Capcom’s fighter, the more I play it the more I realise the actual animation is merely “functional”, but I imagine that’s what is required to ship a reboot of a franchise where every animation is subject to timing changes for game balancing throughout the project. What appeals most about this visuals are the incredibly solid models and their accompanying rigging and facial poses, so it’s nice to see that the Japanese Softimage site has a page up regarding both these aspects, (with a link to another page demonstrating Resident Evil 5’s volume-retaining arm rig too). Check it out here.

Via the Google translation I see that the game has 25 characters of around 16,000 polygons each, comprising some 5000 animations. The rigging videos are of most interest however, highlighting both their facial & finger sliders and the unique controls for Dhalsim’s squash and stretch limbs. In a break from what I’m used to , the team take a less modular approach to facial expressions, with broad sliders for various facial expressions as opposed to sliders for each area of the face which can afford greater control for the animator but proves more time consuming and being prone to going off-model. This might be a viable approach with such stylised characters however, and they control the following variables:

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An enterprising player has figured out how to swap out animation sets on the PC version of Streetfighter IV, to great comic effect. What’s most interesting about this is that it’s all handled very gracefully (doesn’t break the system, which could have happened so easily) revealing a little about how their animation is stored. That the animations remap so well displays a consistent skeleton hierarchy (or bone naming convention) across all characters shown, which one would expect given the humanoid shape of each character in the game.

All body animation appears to be rotation-only, given that the limb lengths do not warp and stretch to assume the positions of the bones in the animations. IK does however appear to be solved for each limb as the arms and legs of the shorter characters hyper-extend (stretch out) to meet the required feet and hand positions of the original animations. The only visual artifacts like this occur in the face, showing that position keys must be involved in creating the facial animations.

The camera animations for intros and special moves are bundled with the animation sets, highlighting that both the sound and visual effects of the chosen character remain intact on the character rather than the animation sets and play out on corresponding actions quite well. This illustrates that there must be identically organised sets of each for every character.

[via GiantBomb]

Still on my pixel art trip, I created this out of fridge magnets the other day. Coincidentally, one of the guys at work forwarded this page by SNK Playmore illustrating their methods for pixel art creation, (which they refer to as “Dot Art”.) While I’ve always been a fan of Capcom’s games, I do appreciate that SNK’s character art and animation are superior, with a personal preference for the realistic style of Shinkiro below.

There are instructions as to the various stages of the art creation but unfortunately the text is image-based so I can’t babel it. While there are 5 characters at the time of writing, it looks like it’s going to grow over time so certainly something to check back on.

UPDATE: Thanks to Jason Porath for swiftly providing a translation for the stages of production:

1. Get the design of the character, usually from the art director, or sometimes Rough Design. One character usually takes about 3 days.
2. Make a 3d model of the character. This usually takes 2 weeks per character. You also make the ranges of motion, which takes around 2 months/character.
3. Render out the 3d character. To bake out all the animation for one character usually takes around 2 weeks.
4. Touch up the render, according to art director’s wishes. This usually takes 1 week per character.
5. Add in additional stuff like wrinkles, muscle creases, and the like, while maintaining the form. This takes each character around 6 and a half months (!). This is where all the character’s consistency in form is checked.
6. Adding in gradients. This takes 2 and a half months per character.

Each character usually has around 500 frames of animation, but some are up to 4x that.

Last summer, Sony announced the cancellation of internal projects The Getaway 3 and Eight Days, with the former garnering most of the press. Sometime later, a video demonstrating the basic navigation and cover system of Eight Days was uploaded to YouTube by near-legendary former BioWare/Ubisoft/Sony (& more) animator Jim Jagger, demonstrating a system far in advance of anything else out there to this day. The orignal has since been removed, but thankfully another user has reinstated it at the time of writing so appreciate it while you can.

Though it looks a little slow in relation to real gameplay balance that might have come later in production, the sheer fuidity of the actions and camera, and the multitude of states (poses) the character can move between is something of a marvel. One can only hope that we’ll see some variation of it in an upcoming game.

At the risk of coming across as a fanboy, here is a second dose of Metal Gear 4 details divulged on the net. It appears that the Kojima Productions team did the rounds quite a bit post-release as it includes yet more images and information on the making of Metal Gear 4.

The image to the side shows the skeleton used for main protagonist Snake, revealing the inclusion of deformation bones to maintain volume on the elbows, knees and wrists on top of the now-standard twist bones for the shoulders, hips and wrists. Unidentifiable, however, are the curious bones at the neck – perhaps to aid shoulder deformation or simply to attach weapons to?

Some stats from the article:

• 115 bones in total, comprising:
• 36 in the face.
• 47 in the body.
• 32 in the hands, (3 for each finger, with an additional bone on each hand between the thumb and index finger – presumably to maintain volume).
• 1700 animations, over MGS3’s 1200.
• 1400 polygons, up from MGS3’s 4400.
• 5MB of textures, with a 512×512 for the face and 1024×1024 for the body.

Additionally, a higher-res screenshot of the FaceManager facial animation sliders allow us to peer deeper into the variables used to bring their fantastic characters to life. Here’s the modest list of facial expressions to accompany their similarly conservative facial bone-count:

• Nose_Up
• Open_Jaw L/R
• Smile L/R
• Anger L/R
• Kiss L/R
• Frown L/R
• Extra_A L/R
• Extra_B L/R

One imagines the last two to be unique to each character, and there are clearly additional tabs for Phonemes, Eyes and Wrinkles.

David Sirlin, Lead Designer on the recently released Street Fighter II HD, has created this handy microsite hosting documentation that details the rebalancing changes made to the new version. It gives an interesting insight into the design decisions bringing this latest release to fruition.

I was deeply worried about a Vancouver-based team taking the mantle of perhaps the most perfectly balanced multiplayer game ever, but in playing I’ve already found it to be so much better than past home versions, and it more than whets the appetite for the upcoming 4th edition.