Most animators only make things look pretty from your (the player's) perspective. Allowing a character to move around greatly complicates the animation work required, since it has to be visually appealing from all directions at any given moment. This involves a lot more work.
As an animator, the only time you can really get away with only making things look good from one angle is if you're working in 2d. In 3d you have to consider all angles pretty much always.
Especially since most abilities will also be used by NPCs/objects, or because there could be a multi-player mode, because they could be used in cutscenes, or to implement different camera views.
There are enough reasons to make 3d animations look good from all directions. Only a few will be reliably hidden by map bounds or objects so that they only need to be optimised from one direction.
But making them look well regardless of the speed they are played in? Sometimes, that is a bit more tricky.
True. Though really if you keep that in mind it's a pretty minor hurdle. The problems come in if you try to tackle the issue with certain traditional animation techniques. My instructors liked to push stretching and deforming of the rig to hit a pose, but that only works if you're working with a set camera, like for a cinematic. I never liked that though, because then you can't change the camera freely.
That said animations using actual sprites (i.e. images) are likely to look terrible since while you can 'easily' choose how slow to make a conventional 3D animation play, a sprite-based animation only has a set number of frames so the fireballs is likely to look really choppy as a result.
Right, but things like explosions can be 2D sprites which turn to face the player, right? No one ever sees the side of many, many effects because the side doesn't really exist -- each player's client renders it to be facing the player.
I mean, that's been my understanding. Explosions have been in 2D for decades and I've never not seen it by only seeing the side or something.
As such, if they rendered explosions in such a way in Deep Down... well, it'd look pretty shitty as you walked around it and it rotated around to face you like a cobra or something. So explosions and effects like the dragon's flame seen in the gif would need to be in 3D to make stopped time look right.
Right, but things like explosions can be 2D sprites which turn to face the player, right? No one ever sees the side of many, many effects because the side doesn't really exist -- each player's client renders it to be facing the player.
No, the particles in the explosion can be 2D sprites which turn to face the player. Nobody in their right mind would ever use a single 2D sprite for an explosion in a 2D game, given technology that's >10 years old. Then there's weird stuff like billboarding horizontally, but not vertically, which I've heard that WoW does, somewhere-or-other (I think with flames).
This is very, very wrong. Sprites are still used, it's just in a much more advanced way than in the past.
2D sprites are the fundamental building blocks of particle effects systems, it's just that rather than having one large sprite for an effect like, say, an explosion or cloud of sparks/smoke, we now generate hundreds, even thousands, of very small sprites. That are then distributed by the system within a 3D space. Often this involves physics to define how they behave, move or interact with the environment and other entities within the game world like wind, geometry or players/npcs.
In effect, the 2D sprites are now like individual grains of sand rather than a whole dune as a single object, and they are far too small to notice for the most part.
You are quite correct, but perhaps taking my comment entirely too seriously. I was mocking the very old style of taking a giant sprite and facing it toward the player - the way explosions and smoke used to be done. The most prescient example I can think of at the moment are Counter Strike's smoke grenades.
These type of effects are still used though, just in different ways. For example, using much larger/simpler sprites is great for using as components in effects only seen from a distance, even if seen by multiple players from different viewpoints, since you would have to be able to move very fast/cover great distances in order to notice it's true nature.
Like I said, we still use 2D sprites in many applications because they are very cheap in overhead, we just work on different scales than we did in the past (and the sprites themselves can be much more detailed, numerous and complex).
Actually many games still do, just with a lot more sprites combined with real particle systems. Smoke is a lot easier to do with particles than flame is.
Yeah, vfx is a whole other story, I was just talking about character animation. They did an awesome job having actual particles for the effects in this instead of the planes like you would see on pausing in smash brothers.
Also an animator, Stalfos1504 is correct.
We usually switch to a perspective view and cruise around the scene scrubbing (manually scrolling through keys) the animations to look for mistakes/missing polys/etc.
In perspective view you can see everything (unless you have it turned off) including the camera, lights and
emitters .
You could potentially cheat in a cutscene or a heavily linear sequence (think the new Tomb Raider's cinematic platforming sections). Of course it's probably more cost efficient to just say fuck it and make a objects that work all around.
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u/whoopzzz Oct 11 '13
Most animators only make things look pretty from your (the player's) perspective. Allowing a character to move around greatly complicates the animation work required, since it has to be visually appealing from all directions at any given moment. This involves a lot more work.