Frequently Asked Forum Questions
Search the HBO News Archives Any All Exact		Search the Halo Updates DBs Halo Halo2		Bungie Webcam HBO XBL Gamertags *Ar's Simple HTML Guide Shishka's Guide for Newcomers The Lowdown on Download Accelerators Red Loser's Anti-Spamming Guide Egg FAQ | More Egg Stuff c0ld's Movie Starter Guide Shishka's HaloPC Pre-Release FAQ 3.1 AutoMagic 117 StripzMaker
Search Older Posts on This Forum: Posts on Current Forum | Archived Posts

Re: Thank You from Bungie Animators
Posted By: Ibeechu	Date: 10/20/10 1:44 a.m.
In Response To: Re: Thank You from Bungie Animators (Asian Inferno) : I don't know, an animators job is still very important, but I think the : method of mocap helped bring in more of the believability of the : characters in Reach much more than any previous game. Mild rant from an animation snob ahead :) The keyword there is believability. Tradition animation ranges from the realistic (think of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park) to the outrageously cartoony (Chuck Jones, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs). What connects them is believability. A movie like The Incredibles is a great example for both styles. Much of the business on screen isn't realistic at all, but you feel it. You believe it. The fact that it was animated entirely by hand does not make it any less belivable, and it, in fact, gives it a huge advantage. The art of animation comes from reducing movement to its essence. It's about distilling something to its core and then building on top of of that. It's about finding what's appealing about a certain movement or why it communicates an idea the way it does. You're able to break down reality to its simplest form. It's literally a caricature of motion. Stripping out everything that's unnecessary, leaving only what tells a story, and then exaggerating that. Animation is made up of a series of poses that communicate an idea. You have to worry about how the silhouette reads, and things like lines of action to draw the audience's eye. A great single pose can tell what a character is thinking more clearly than any sort of dialogue, because it goes down deep to the fundamental essence of what a character is feeling. With mocap, you don't really have a chance to think about clear posing or timing. It's literally a reproduction of an actor. And if you've ever seen mocapped animation by itself, it just looks awful. Like, think about movies like Final Fantasy and Beowulf and The Polar Express. It's lifeless and bland and off-putting. Mocap has to be polished by an animator before it's usable. But even so, the majority of the data is there already. You can maybe exaggerate a pose or two, but you don't get to push it as far as you normally would, and you certainly can't change the timing that much. That fundamentally goes against every principle of animation. If you want realistic human actors, why not do live-action? Animation is caricature and believability, not realism. Check out Al Hirschfeld's caricatures. They look like the people they represent more than the people themselves, because they remove things you wouldn't normally see and then exaggerate the things that are recognizable. It's almost like they're how you'd remember someone, not what they're actually like. And that makes it connect so much deeper than just a photograph of that person. Now, I think there are some limited uses of mocap. I think it worked very, very well in Avatar, especially since it had to integrate with live actors. An animator could have done it but ultimately it can't look like animation, so you wouldn't be thinking about posing or timing much anyway. In a case like this, it has its place. Hell, maybe even in a game like Reach where the characters are supposed to be as "real" as possible, maybe it even has a place, but I still don't think so. A game is still 100% CG anyway. You don't have to integrate with live action, and a good animator will no doubt add a lot to the cinematics and whatever. Don't forget that animators are actors. We do the same things actors do, except we act through a puppet or a drawing rather than our own bodies. But because of that, we have so much more control than a live action actor does. We can play very clearly to camera and that leads to even clearer staging. We can exaggerate what you see and remove everything you don't. Ultimately, realistic or not, it makes a character believable and feel alive. This character is real and he thinks and he has goals. It's the reason Bugs Bunny is more believable than Beowulf. So there's my thesis for tonight. I have a huge passion for animation and I love talking about it so I might have gotten carried away, but I hope I explained why mocap annoys me. Cliffs: - Animation caricatures reality, while mocap just reproduces it. - Caricatures often feel more believable than real life because they exaggerate the things that are recognizable and true to us, while removing everything that isn't. - Just because mocap captures how a real person moves doesn't make it believable. The characters in Reach moved realistically, but (all writing aside), did you ever really feel like they had emotion? See below Here's a postscript to my post. Reach's characters had much more advanced facial rigging and controls, but it ended up being overused. I mean. Fuck. Look at this scene from Halo 3, whose characters had much simpler faces. She gets the idea to kill herself and Johnson, but you can see the exact moment, when she looks into his eyes, that she actually understands it. Then, as her humanity really starts to creep through, she relaxes her arm. Johnson shouts "Now!" and her military training kicks in. She straightens her arm and her whole body. You feel her go through every thought. And she doesn't say a word. It's all in her animation; her acting. Halo 3 actually had loads of examples like this. Hell, so did Halo 2, especially with the Arbiter. And they didn't even have Halo 3's facial rigs back then. I mean, Christ. In Cortana's rescue in Halo 3, the Chief's poses are so great. You actually feel what he feels without seeing any sort of face at all; it's all in his body. I challenge you to find any moment like these in Reach. The facial rigs are better, but the acting is lifeless. For the record, I really, really do not fault the animators in this. I've seen a lot of their reels and they're all very talented. And they actually did a great job with everything that wasn't mocapped (and with cleaning up the mocap). I have to blame it on the decision to use mocap in the first place, because its contradictory to the philosophy of animation. I'll just leave it at that for now :P

Message Index

Thank You from Bungie Animators	Ibeechu	10/19/10 9:27 p.m.
cool *NM*	Hawaiian Pig	10/19/10 9:30 p.m.
That's awesome, man! *NM*	GrimBrother One	10/19/10 9:30 p.m.
Re: Thank You from Bungie Animators	Asian Inferno	10/19/10 9:32 p.m.
Re: Thank You from Bungie Animators	Ibeechu	10/20/10 1:44 a.m.
^ This post owns *NM*	Hawaiian Pig	10/20/10 2:16 a.m.
Re: Thank You from Bungie Animators	Wayward Spleen™	10/20/10 7:30 a.m.
Re: Thank You from Bungie Animators	Wildcard Tim	10/20/10 8:47 a.m.
Re: Thank You from Bungie Animators	tln	10/20/10 9:00 a.m.
Re: Thank You from Bungie Animators	Ibeechu	10/20/10 2:18 p.m.
Re: Thank You from Bungie Animators	tln	10/20/10 4:05 p.m.
Weird question inbound	topleybird	10/20/10 10:05 a.m.
Re: Weird question inbound	Ibeechu	10/20/10 1:59 p.m.
Re: Weird question inbound	Cody Miller	10/20/10 2:04 p.m.
Re: Weird question inbound	Wayward Spleen™	10/20/10 3:16 p.m.
Re: Thank You from Bungie Animators	mnemesis	10/20/10 11:04 a.m.
Re: Thank You from Bungie Animators	kapowaz	10/20/10 11:08 a.m.
Re: Thank You from Bungie Animators	Kermit	10/20/10 2:26 p.m.
Excellend post. Now I want to buy Halo 3 again. *NM*	Cullen	10/20/10 11:17 a.m.