For those game animators out there looking for some inspiration or just to add some variety to existing demoreels these should prove invaluable, and if there are any technical guys out there that fancy a quick rig and skin challenge it would be much appreciated…

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.

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:

• DEFAULT_UPPER_PARTS
  • DEFAULT
• DEFAULT_LOWER_PARTS
  • DEFAULT
• SPK_LOWER_PARTS
  • SPK_A_ACCENT
  • SPK_A
  • SPK_E_ACCENT
  • SPK_E
  • SPK_I_ACCENT
  • SPK_I
  • SPK_N_ACCENT
  • SPK_N
  • SPK_O_ACCENT
  • SPK_O
  • SPK_U_ACCENT
  • SPK_U
• BHV_UPPER_PARTS
  • BHV_BLINK
• EMO_UPPER_PARTS
  • EMO_ANGER
  • EMO_ATTACK_ACCENT
  • EMO_ATTACK
  • EMO_AWAKENING
  • EMO_CRY
  • EMO_FEAR
  • EMO_HATE
  • EMO_JOY
  • EMO_SHOUT
  • EMO_SMILE
  • EMO_SORROW
  • EMO_SURPRISE
  • EMO_TIREDNESS
• EMO_LOWER_PARTS
  • EMO_ANGER
  • EMO_ATTACK_ACCENT
  • EMO_ATTACK
  • EMO_AWAKENING
  • EMO_CRY
  • EMO_FEAR
  • EMO_HATE
  • EMO_JOY
  • EMO_SHOUT
  • EMO_SMILE
  • EMO_SORROW
  • EMO_SURPRISE
  • EMO_TIREDNESS

Click here to view the embedded video.

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]

In both Soul Calibur IV and Soul Calibur Broken Destiny, everything, including fabrics, is animated by “bones”.

On the PS3, there are two separate bones in each breast, giving a total of four, and it is these which give rise to breast motion, whereas on the PSP for the sake of load reduction things had to be simplified. We managed to obtain satisfactory results with only one “bone” across both breasts.

Swaying breasts may be most enjoyable, but from time to time we are warned that they move a little too much.

Via andriasang.com

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.

On a positive note though, the “Customer Stories” section of the Japanese Softimage site have now been translated, so offer insights in the production of not just MGS4, but also a handful of other major Japanese games such as Capcom’s Devil May Cry 4 pictured above. Go check it out.

Walt Disney Animation Studios: Building A Hamster Named Rhino

Clay Kaytis, Philippe Brochu & Hidetaka Yosumi – Lead Animator, Lead Modeller and Technical Director for the character Rhino.

This presentation could easily be split into two parts, with the first concerning the solution achieved to maintain model fidelity in a character that could easily move between biped and quadruped movement, and the second on their general deformation solution for all areas of body/limb movement.

Beginning with an exclusive new trailer, the speakers began by describing the requirements of the rig which required the dual functionality of quadruped rodent-like movement and bipedal anthropomorphic acting. The character Rhino was described as essentially a ball of fat covered in fur that exists primarily inside a hamster-ball. While the ball-rig setup may have proven an interesting topic enough, with the TD writing special software for this alone, it proved enough of a challenge to overcome the transition between 4 and 2-leg stances.

Initially, tens of steps of deformers were employed to handle the transition which required the character to undergo a variety of transformations such as rotating the head 90 degrees to face front once standing, however all these corrective tools slowed down the rig somewhat. As is something of a standard now, the team began putting the model through its paces by forcing it into many poses and drawing on top what should be the corrections made to fully realise them. However, difficult posing not ideally suited to the rig cause further corrective work on the modellers’ side downstream, and more importantly caused the animators to treat the rig somewhat conservatively with less-adventurous animation.

At some point towards the end of pre-production, a decision had to be made whether to change the rig to better support the animators. This required a new way of approaching the modelling/animation workflow for Disney studios, eschewing the previous linear progression of modelling->rigging->animation-> in favour of a much more versatile circular progression under the banner of the “character team” where each area has buy-in at every stage, much like agile development. The name given to this month-long process was affectionaly termed “Rhino-Palooza”, and it’s success spawned similar “palooza’s” for every other major character.

As the aim was to share only one rig for both pedal stances, the solution was to to simply morph the character model between ideal quad and biped topologies, allowing for a smooth transition between running and standing even during motions. This is essentially the same method employed in High Voltage’s Xenomorph XNA demo in 2004, and was overshadowed by the clever solution to the second problem posed by Rhino’s body.

With such a short neck, arms and legs, in order to fully realise Rhino’s mandate of “a ball of fat covered in fur” the team had to come up with a new system for using corrective chapes to intelligently deform the character. To this end, they improved on Disney’s own PSD (Pose Space Deformer) system that applied morphs for every major movement to maintain character model integrity. PSD is an in-house tool at Disney that directly talks with Maya’s skin-clusters.

Unlike many game-engine limitations, Disney’s animators are free to fully animate bones using all the areas of translation, rotation and scale, and most importantly are free to break the rigs as they please. As such, animators are able to get the most out of any character without fear of affecting the final result downstream, but this also means that traditional methods for employing corrective shapes do not always come into effect.

The old method of creating a shape for each an every rotation value (eg, x,y & z for the neck) did not take into account actions that were animated with scaling of the bone or even breaking it via translation, and creating shapes for each value would have resulted in far too many shapes than would both be realistic to maintain and would likely slow the rig to a halt. Additionally, simple actions like leaning the neck into the shoulder might cause the fat to bunch up there, but if the shoulder was already down the fat shouldn’t squash up at all.

The elegant solution they finally arrived at was a sytem of locators positioned on the low-res character mesh whereby, rather than using simply bone rotation values to drive keys on morphs, instead measured the relative distance between two or more relevant locators to decide if a morph should be blended in. Interestingly, the team actually found that results were increased as they reduced the locator-count and fine-tuned the driven-key inputs.

This system is a much more robust approach to the familiar driven-key morph-target and, (as were are moving closer to employing driven-keys in realtime game engines), sounds like a good method to investigate – should one ever have the chance to work on a game invloving a small number of high-resolution characters.

A few weeks back, details of the facial animation rig and other workflow info had been posted on the Japanese XSI website and I was planning to extract information via the google tranlation and observation alone, but someone beat me to it, (and managed to do a much better job than I would ever have). Head on over to Chris Evans’ (Tech-Art Lead at Crytek) blog for full translations of the following sections:

• MGS4 Facial Animation
• MGS4 Character Pipeline
• MGS4 Cluster Constraint Setup

Regarding the  facial setup, it looks very reminiscent of the same method I saw presented at ADAPT 2007 by Aaron Holly of Disney. This involved a similar setup of a bone rig driven by a mesh giving the two following important advantages.

1. It was highly flexible and able to be moved between multiple similar faces as the animation is stored on a nurbs mesh that drives the bones rather than the bones directly, therefore allowing for varying bone positions.
2. If using a pose-based facial animation solution such as FaceFX, the bones travel along the curve of a nurbs surface rather than a simple linear translation, therefore better mimicking the movement of skin across the skull.

This is certainly something I’d be keen to try in the near future given that it now appears to have successfully been put through a full videogame production.

Unable to animate actual existing objects such as bones they had to create IK-based animations objects described by a process of elimination, relative to the body, then had a team of animation testers evaluate the animations on as many different character extremes as possible. Though I rarely play PC games, I’m really looking forward to giving Spore a spin not least to evaluate how successful a solution it really was, (but that’s only if I can overcome the urge to solely make penis monsters).