[cheerful acoustic guitar riff] Hey! Hello everybody and welcome to this first question and answer animation episode thing. I am currently working on the next set of episodes for The Animation of Video Games series, but it's not done yet--they actually take longer to do now, ever since Shadow of the Colossus when I started doing the thing where I record the gameplay footage first and then I kinda discuss it and record commentary later and then I edit it all together--it takes a lot longer than i
t used to, but I think the episodes are better for it. All of that to say, the episodes are coming. I'm gonna probably record footage for the next set of them
after this, actually. I thought in the meantime it might be fun to answer a few of your animation questions, and so I asked on Twitter and you guys gave me like, fifty questions, which is way more than I have time to answer here, but I will try to answer as many as I can. Now the footage you see in the background is just B-reel footage stu
ff that I got from Jak and Daxter, and the music is a bunch of cool remixes
from cool people, and I'll put links to all of them down in the text description so you should just go download all of them. Most of them of them are free, probably, so go do that. By the way, I apologize if my voice sounds a little funny; I have a cold. But anyway, you guys asked a lot of good questions, so let's get to a bunch of those. [reading displayed text] Okay, uh. Oh, okay. So this one-- I think this question ca
me from our
Extra Credits Media Director, Soraya, who was helping me get the Google Form set up, so I think this is from her, so not a real question. Movin' on. Next question! Are you a coco-- [sighs] Soraya! [reading displayed text] You and me both. I am actually really bad at predicting the timing and like, the frame count between keyframes when blocking out animation early on. Fortunately, with 3D animation it's pretty easy to
kinda feel it out, like you can build all your poses and then kind
a
move them around in the time slider and just like kinda feel out the timing naturally but, for like, a 2D animator, that's probably a little harder; for stop motion, I guess it's impossible. I don't know. Stop motion animators are wizards. How do you feel about motion capture?
Can it replace hand-done animation? I think that motion capture is an excellent tool for specific jobs. There are a lot of animators who may feel negatively toward motion capture, partly because some of them may feel th
at it kind of takes their jobs in a certain way, which I think a lot of animators are kind of
over that feeling now, I think that was a more common feeling
way back in the day. Now I think a lot of animators just aren't that interested in motion capture because it's not as interesting work. It kinda takes a lot of the creativity away from the animator, like rather than getting to animate a thing yourself and kind of come up with it, you are given a mostly kinda finished, realistic-looking animat
ion and told to just clean it up or make it look like 10% better or something. But yeah, for some situations it is
just the best tool for the job. Motion capture is really good for getting realistic animation done in bulk, basically. Like if you're making a game and you're trying to make it look photo-real and you just need a ton of animations, it is going to be way faster and cheaper to just put somebody capable in a suit and have them act all that stuff out and then just have a bunch of animat
ors clean that stuff up later than having them build all that stuff from scratch.
Like it would take way longer to do that. So yeah, like for some jobs motion capture is great.
It is the best tool available. [reading displayed text] I couldn't give you a very technical answer to this because I'm [mumbling] not super technical myself, but most animation engines have the ability to blend between animations somewhat freely. It won't do it in a smart way, the computer is basically just figuring out,
"Okay where is this animation supposed to be at this point and this other animation is supposed to be at this point and I'm just going to linearly blend from one to the next like a crossfade." It won't look super natural in most cases but it's a really useful tool, like say I could just put in a walk cycle animation and a run cycle animation and hook them up in such a way that the computer can basically blend pretty nicely between the walk and the run so I can have a character start running and
then slow down to a walk and start running again and slow down to a walk and that's a really cool ability. Not all games have that, maybe they don't have it for performance reasons, or maybe they don't have it for like gamplay reasons. But yeah, it's a useful tool, blending. How do different framerates or variable framerates affect how you animate? You are one of several people who asked questions about framerates, so hopefully I can answer most of you here with this one. Variable framerates ar
e not a huge concern to me
when I'm animating because, like, when I animate in a 3D package like Maya or 3ds Max or whatever you're using, I am animating at a constant frame rate.
I'm treating frames as a unit of measure, so I will be animating at 30 frames per second
or 60 frames per second or whatever the case. And the nice thing is that if things are all set up right, when I export my animation and put it into the game, the game is going to play that animation back properly, no matter what f
ramerate it's running at. If it is running at a crazy high framerate, it may be doing some interpolation to kinda calculate the in-betweens between the frames that I animated. Like, say, if i animated something at 30 frames per second and the game's running at 60 frames per second, the timing should stay the same. Where framerate does become a concern for the animator is when higher framerates happen to "smooth out" or kind of soften the animations you make. Generally, as I understand it, you ki
nd of want to animate in your 3D package at the same framerate that your game
is generally targeting because an animation that looks really good
at 30 frames per second may look not quite right at 60 frames per second, especially if it's meant to be like
a really sharp, quick movement, like a punch, that looks really good
at 30 frames per second. When you're seeing that smoothed out at
crisp 60 frames per second, it may kind of feel softened, like your eye is seeing a few more frames in that pun
ching motion and it just makes it feel a little bit softer
and less snappy. So in that particular case, I would really want to really be getting in there as an animator and carefully watching the spacing for every one of those 60 frames per second or whatever. That's a long way of saying that it mostly doesn't matter until it kind of does. [chuckles] How do you get the "stop" frame of a
running animation right? Like, if you look at Dragon Age: Inquisition's "stop" frames, like every time the cha
racter stops it looks rushed and just wrong. Okay, so I'm assuming you're talking about like, when a character is running full speed in a game and you stop pressing forward and the character just instantly snaps, like, pops to standing perfectly still and upright, like they've been standing still this whole time, like completely losing all inertia and it just feels really aphysical and I know what you're talking about. So, usually the best way to solve that is with a combination of blends, like
I was talking about earlier, and handmade, custom animations to give the character the feeling of stopping suddenly and then, like, standing upright, just a little transitional animation. The tricky thing is like, usually a real person, if they were running full speed and then stopping would need to kind of take a few steps to slow down, but in a game you can't really do that because the player wanted the character to stop at that exact point-- that's why they stopped pressing forward--and if th
e character keeps running for a few steps, they may run off the cliff that the player was trying to avoid or something. So it's a tricky situation where the player wants the character to stop immediately even though for animation that looks weird, so you usually,
as an animator, have to find ways to kind of fudge it and make it look kind of okay, even though it is an unnaturally quick stop. [reading displayed text] Boy, there are a lot of differences between video game and movie animation. i gue
ss mostly in terms of working in video games or movies, maybe not in like, how the result looks. Movie animation tends to be held to a much higher standard of polish. You need to make that animation look as perfect as possible if you are working in film, which usually also means that you are given more time to make that animation look that good. Like, working in games, I generally am working at a much faster rate because I have so much more quantity that
I have to crank out. Movie animation also
has the benefit of being animated to a camera that is the same every single time, so you as the animator know where the camera is, and you can animate something to look really good from that one camera angle without having to worry about how it looks from any other angle, whereas in games, the player might have control of the camera, so you don't have that luxury. I could probably go on for a long time talking about differences. Maybe I will sometime in another video. In terms of which one has
taken bigger leaps to be better in recent years, I would say definitely video game animation, mostly just by virtue of how much gaming hardware has improved in the last decade, two decades, for as long as games have been around basically. Like, film animation has improved too, but the fact that gaming consoles and PCs have grown so much more powerful allows game animators to do a lot more stuff in real time to a much greater degree of fidelity than we used to be able to, so it's just a much more
visible improvement. [reading displayed text] I'm not planning to do a video specifically
focused on just that, but I do have a lot of animation episodes planned in the future that are definitely going to touch on that. After I'm done with this 12 principles series of games, I'm planning to move on to do all the numbered Final Fantasy games in chronological order and it's definitely gonna come up for that and also for several other series that I've got planned after that, which will probably co
me out after that. [reading displayed text] It just so happens that there is an Extra Credits episode coming out pretty soon-ish, maybe in the next couple weeks that will hopefully be able to answer that pretty thoroughly, so I will just say wait until that episode comes out. Until then, if you haven't already, go pick up this one book called The Animator's Survivor Kit by Richard Williams. It is a book that contains basically all of the foundational principles of animation in it and just really
gives you an idea of how the craft works. Pretty much every animator I know is aware of that book and probably owns it, so if you're just getting started, just trying to kind of figure out how animation works, pick that book up. [reading displayed text] Uh Hmm I mean, yes, I do take pride in, like, when I animate something that really looks and feels right and like, even though no one will probably really notice just because it looks and feels right, so they'll just think "Oh, yeah, that looks
cool." But honestly, I think the most, like, satisfying thing for me as an animator is when I see a shot or an animation having the effect that
I was trying to get, or like getting the reaction from an audience that
I was aiming for. If it was meant to be funny, if it makes people laugh that feels super awesome. Or if people just really respond to something looking cool or cute or whatever else, and that's what you were going for, that feels super cool as an animator, so, yeah. In your job as an
animator, do they just tell you what the character needs to do and you run free, or are they specific down to the details? This largely depends on the job and the workplace and the directors you're working under. Like, I've worked on some projects where the director was very particular and had a kinda complete idea of what they wanted the film to be in their head already, so I could propose my own ideas, but they already kinda had an idea of what they wanted, so my job was largely to give them
what they were already kind of envisioning in their head. But I've also worked on projects where I had total creative freedom and could just run completely hog wild and do whatever I wanted. And I honestly don't know which one I like better.
I kind of like a-- I think I kind of favor a middle ground between having some direction but then being allowed to take that direction and run with it, as opposed to just having to come up with something completely from scratch. I don't know. I feel like I'v
e worked at both extreme ends of that spectrum and I can't really decide which I prefer. [reading displayed text] Pretty much for the same reason that it's way harder to realistically paint a landscape than it is to look at one. [reading displayed text] Nope. [reading displayed text] huh [quietly] That's a good question. In some ways, yes, I would say that working in games has been equally fulfilling, partially just because I'm learning so much, like animating for games is such a complicated thi
ng just because there's so much tech involved and making all these animations work together and flow together and figuring out how to make them both look good and feel good to the player and-- there's so much learning I still have to do. I feel like-- like, I've been working in games for, like, I guess like two-ish, three years now and I still feel like I barely know anything at this point. One thing I do miss from film animation, though, is that, when you're animating a film, the entire emphasi
s is on crafting a performance and making a character act. Like, with games, you'll be animating all kinds
of physical things that the character just has to be able to do in a game, like running or jumping or attacking, or just every single possible thing that the character might end up doing. Whereas with film, it's kind of nice being able to just get into a character's head and act through that character and--I don't know, it's a different kind of experience. I really am enjoying both, but I a
m finding that I don't have nearly as many opportunities to get into that kind of "acting" mindset with game animation, which is a little sad, but it comes with its own cool, interesting problems to solve too, so I don't know. They're both good. [reading displayed text] That probably varies from animator to animator,
I think everybody's got their strengths. I find timing pretty challenging. I feel like getting really good at timing is like the artist equivalent of getting good at drawing a perfe
ct circle. Like, you can be a really good artist, but drawing a perfect circle is still really really impossibly difficult, and I think timing is a thing that you just get better and better at but never really master, so Yeah, I would say timing, but I'm sure other animators would probably give you a different principle that is their own struggle. [reading displayed text] I totally feel you on that. My method which works for me--mileage may vary-- but my method is usually to create lists of ever
ything that needs to get done, and then kind of create sub-lists for each of those, and then just write that sub-list down on a sticky note, so that's the only thing I have to look at, so I can just focus on that smaller task until it is done, then move onto the next thing, break it into smaller tasks, just get that on a sticky note-- my desk tends to be pretty darn covered
with sticky notes, but it really helps for me to be able to just focus on a smaller task for a little while, get that out o
f the way, not stress out about the whole larger scope of the thing, and then move on. And yeah, it does end up constantly feeling like, "Alright I finished this, now here's the next thing, now here's the next thing, now here's the next thing," and you're just doing that forever, but that's just the nature of big projects, really. [reading displayed text] I kind of already talked about motion capture, so I won't get into that again, but I don't think that key frame animators need to be all that
worried, because even though motion capture may become an increasingly large, prominent part
of the animation job market, and that probably doesn't sound super fun for
a lot of animators, but like I said before, it's a good tool for certain jobs, and a bad tool for other ones. And those other jobs still need to be done,
so key frame animators, for the foreseeable future, I think can rest easy, 'cause I think our skill set is gonna be needed for a while yet. Probably forever, 'cause motion captur
e is not going to get you Jak and Daxter, I'll tell you that. [reading displayed text] Both. All. Yes. Both of them are completely capable of powerful emotional impact. I'm sure you have seen both 2D and 3D animated films that have just really got you emotionally, so, yeah. Equally capable. [reading displayed text] I'm sorry. A gameplay programmer working on
Horizon Zero Dawn-- oh, sweet! Okay. I am looking forward to your game. Good luck with that. I can't wait. Can I show an animation network?
Okay, I'm going to find some images on the internet, and I'm going to put them up right now, and I'm guessing this is probably not going to make any sense to almost all of you, and that's okay because just glancing at it, it doesn't make a ton of sense to me either, and now that I think of it, I should really bring in a tech animator one of these days, or a tech artist, to explain this stuff because it is very complicated. I am only just learning it myself, but it is incredibly important for un
derstanding how animation actually works and triggers and blends and all that stuff in a game, so I will think on that. Eventually, I will try to get a tech artist in here to explain it better than I can. [reading displayed text] I will definitely be talking about pixel art at some point, I mean, the Final Fantasy series I mentioned is gonna be pixel art for the first six games, so. One of the problems I'm worried about running into is that I have not personally worked in pixel art before, or do
ne any, not even in school. I've tried to do some research and talk to other pixel artists to gain a better understanding of how pixel art and pixel animation works, so I will try to do my research for these, so I can give you a semi-informed expla--explananation--of how all this stuff works, but it's not something I've done myself. And, I don't know, I actually hadn't considered Shovel Knight or Undertale, but the list of games that I'm intending to eventually
get to is long, so I don't see any
reason why I can't add those to the list, 'cause I like both of those games a lot. [reading displayed text] Really the best resource, that I use anyway, is just getting the video footage on my computer in QuickTime or some other player that is capable of going frame by frame and just really getting in there, going frame by frame and analyzing how that animation works and just really breaking it down. [reading displayed text] I'm actually almost shocked to realize I don't know. Because I know ho
w big my animation team is, but I mean, I don't work at a huge AAA developer necessarily. I actually don't know the answer to this, I will have to ask around. And finally, last question today: [reading displayed text] I would probably do the same thing, maybe stop motion animators don't feel the same way, but stop motion definitely feels like the hardest to me, because it's something that you have to get right beginning to end or start over. I mean, you have to do so much planning and figure out
the timing and all that stuff just so well in your head before you even start getting into executing it and, gosh, just like, bumping a light or something once could screw up hours of work you've already done. Even to me, an animator, stop motion animation feels, like, insane. I don't understand how they do it. I would then rank traditional hand-drawn 2D animation probably close to that. I have done some of that myself, but I'm not a terribly great draftsman, like I can't draw super well, I can
draw kind of okay, but definitely not well enough to be a 2D animator, but yeah, that has always seemed pretty challenging to me as well. Other than that, I honestly don't know. Like, there's the kind of 2D animation that works with Flash and other kinds of programs that is sort of a hybrid CG 2D animation field, which seems like, to me, would be a little bit easier, but maybe that's just because CG 3D animation
is the one I know. And I don't even know where pixel animation fits into that spect
rum of difficulty. It seems really challenging to me, but that's because I still am just kind of learning how that works, so I don't know. Let's just all agree that stop motion is insane. So anyway, yes, thank you guys very much for your questions. I'm sorry I didn't get to all of them.
There were so many. If you would like to ask a question to possibly appear in a future episode, I'll put a link right up here in the video-- ding-- or if not in the video, then down in the description, because ma
ybe I didn't figure out how to put it in the video, but anyway, you can ask a question there, and I may answer it in a future one, if I do more of these. Let me know if you guys like this, by the way, if this is interesting and fun for you guys. If not, then I will just use this effort to try to crank out the animation videos a little faster and not do these Q&A videos, but I figured you guys might like this, I don't know. Let me know. Thank you for watching, thank you for you questions. I will
see you guys again soon with another animation video, hopefully, so see you then! [cheerful acoustic guitar music]
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