Procedural: This means results are changed by the hardware during gameplay - in essence an animation can be changed as it plays back instead of having to be pre-canned
Locomotion: Another name for basic player movement
Transition: What an animation does as it starts and blends with the animation playing before it.
Middleware: Tools used to piece together animations and tune procedural additions to the raw animation data in the game's real-time environment, basically letting us animate "in the game".
Character Grounding with Foot-plantI hate "foot sliding". I have hated it since 3D games hit the shelves on the PS1 when I was an animation student. It eliminates the weight of the characters in the game. A system pioneered for FIFA 2007 was fully integrated into Madden NFL 09 this year by our "Rookie of the Year" engineer. She implemented the system and gave it some very nice improvements to help compensate for the number of players we have in close proximity on the field. We now have the system well tuned and functional and it really helps the characters have more weight than we have seen in the past. Check out this comparison video from 08 to 09:
In this video I wanted to show you the feet up close, first in real-time and then in slow motion. If you watch in slow motion you can see that the feet are released just before the legs are stretched too far, but when I under-steer that spin move (which is animated to end in the same direction it starts) and turn it into a 180, you can see that the feet stay nice and planted.
Note: I am sorry for the 08 stuff not being as clear as the 09, all the 08 footage I could dig up was captured by Ian Cummings on his PC a while ago, and is not progressive scan footage like the 09 is. It does show the animation just as well, but it's not intended to be a rendering comparison.
Click here for the foot plant video LocomotionOur basic player movement got the guts ripped out and replaced this year. We re-animated all of our run cycles from motion capture and we also implemented a brand new procedural animation system for driving it. We added procedural leaning for momentum changes, and the results are much more visually pleasing than what we have seen in the past. Most importantly, we don't sacrifice control of our players. Along with this we had the ability to dampen the AI decisions and get rid of a lot of the "jitter" that is caused by needing to make thousands of complex decision making calculations 60 times a second. With the new locomotion system we are able to improve what occurs when all these factors make the AI "change its mind" very quickly. Check out this comparison video from 08 to 09:
Click here for the locomotion video Transition ControlWe gave our artists control over every transition. This is something we have been doing on FIFA for some time, and it's time consuming and sometimes painful for the animation team, but well worth the effort. All of our animators spent many hours this year in a tool that allows them to see and "scrub" the transitions very much like working in the 3D software we animate in. Based on the visual feedback we can iterate on where animations should break out, and when they do exit, we can set how that transition should look. This system allows us to dive pretty deep into the controls, so you can imagine with about 10,000 of these in our game, we had our work cut out for us. The result is an over-all smoothing of what you see without losing an ounce of controller response.
We never "delay" the transitions, in fact, in pretty much all cases animations will end faster than before, or be interrupted by another state (a feature that was added for Madden NFL 08 and improved farther this year). However when this happens we can now see it, and use the tools to make it look the way want, basically animating control over the blend of current and previous animations to create new motion. This gets rid of the momentum changes and ugly pops that occur when characters transition from one full body animation to another. The result is a much smoother game overall. This is quite important now that we run at 60fps on both the 360 and PS3 because transition pops would be more obvious.
OverallWhen it comes to video game animation and quality, I have been told there are 3 factors: Time, Money and Quality, and you can pick any 2 of them. Well, I think this is actually not set in stone because it lacks one crucial factor: The Holy Grail, that is workflow and iteration speed. EA's animation system is designed to take what used to be weeks and turn it in to a few minutes of turning dials; what used to take us hours (seeing our work in game, or FEELING our animation as dictated by the controls) is now instant and editable. What used to be impossible to tune visually (like transitions), we can now not only tune it but use it to make the game more fun and responsive. These tools give us back time, and time gives us quality. More importantly, we can really quickly "find the fun fast" in our gameplay design.
My overall goal when directing animation on any game is to ensure that realism, response, and fun always come ahead of the "graphics". I then spend my time trying to make visuals look as good as I can within the constraints set before me by our designers (some of the best I have ever worked with are on the Madden team). That is our number one hurdle. The fact is...reality can tend to feel horrible. If we were to release Madden with PERFECT acceleration, deceleration, and natural turn rates for a human who is sprinting, we would be burned alive because you would feel "stuck" in animations all the time. We work in a world of "plausible reality" where many things are not truly "real" but must look realistic (so that our game is still actually playable, but also has realistic and believable animation). Because the engine lets us find the fun fast, and iterate on our work hands-on in the game, as well as put our own new animations into the game as animators, it means we can make animation that looks awesome and is specifically crafted and tuned for the gameplay. We are long gone from the days of shoe-horning animations into the game where they get scaled and clipped to feel right. Now we make them feel right when they are animated.
I look forward to hearing your comments and impressions from the new videos. We still have time to tune the game so if you see anything with animations in these videos that you feel needs to be addressed, please visit the following thread on our
official forums to post your comments!
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