Friday, October 23

ND Devs: No animator could reproduce what we've been able to do

What Naughty Dog has accomplished with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is truly revolutionary. There's no need to beat a dead horse because it has been said so many times before. But there's one aspect of Uncharted 2 that stands out more than any other, and it's the game's cutting edge visuals.

It is arguably the best looking title to grace any console, and to accomplish such a task, it took the lead programmers years of tweaking, changing, manipulating the system, and now, they've managed to master the cell processor. So much so that the devs don't think any other animator could do what they did in Uncharted 2.

Speaking in a video interview with Digital Foundry, one of the lead programmers explained the situation.

"You don't have to have an animator animate every single possible combination of the player putting away his weapon while jumping, or running and shooting, or all these different things," the programmer said.

"Really no animator could animate enough animations to produce the same look that we've been able to do by mixing and matching, by layering animations on top of each other, by blending between animations even of different layers. And that really give the players a lot more control over what he wants to do that's not limited by our animators," he concluded.

A spectacular game don't get made but by much effort and extremely hard work. It also takes a passionate team, and folks who love what they do to accomplish what Naughty Dog has. And by the look of things, gamers are rewarding them with stellar sales. Pick up Uncharted 2 now.

http://gamesthirstarticles.blogspot.com/2009/10/nd-devs-no-animator-could-reproduce.html

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I think ANIMATORS can do such feats, I mean there will be games in the future with better animations (this is an assumption).

He means that it would take a long time for an animator to animate the number of animations used in U2. In other words they found a way of making models that have a way of generating animations without having an animator create the animation.

I'm not sure how that would work specifically. The way I see it as the comparison between sprites and 3d models. You can draw every single frame in order to show the character move, or you can use a 3d model with a skeleton that you can program to move in a certain way.

@OP

You missed the point, that is not about the quality but about the technique.

He's not saying that their animations will never be beaten by other games.

He's saying that they are procedurally mixing and blending partial animations in such quantity and variety that an animator (as in an artist manually creating them) could never produce the sheer quantity of combinations.

While you should never say never... what he is actually saying is that the method they used to create animations was different from the normal method to create animation, and if you used the normal method it would be very very hard, or impossible to make the animations look as good compared to the new method.

yea, could you imagine how long that would take, it would make any animator 

the Engine they have developed help's with that major function of interactivity between the gamer and the game.

just to many combination's.

the same could be said for just about any game it seem's these day's though, the developer's are doing real good in my opinion on getting

unique game experience's to the gamer this generation, with very high quality resolution's that was only a dream for past generation game console's. this is a great time to be a gamer.

No I think no other developer will get this close to perfection.....not this generation of consoles

anyway. It really has to do with how the animations are blended together so as to give the

illusion that Drake has the fluidity of a real person. You are missing the point of the article, it is

not to say "I can do it and you cannot", it is saying that the time it took for them to accomplish

this much fluidity with a video game character (not an animated movie or a cut scene) in real

time is only possible with studying more than just common motion capture. Most games already

incorporate motion capture, but all games do not move with the fluidity that Uncharted exhibits.

This is because like they said the over-lay of animations try to deceive the game player into

thinking that Drake seems more real than created. He never reacts the same way, so you do

not ever see the same "canned" animation over and over again, I actually think it is a refreshing

change for the better.

They'd have to do 17 years of comments like this to get to where Turn 10 is...

I wondering darthdevidem01 got a ps3?

hmm i think the japanese version of FF13 and Versus will be as good. in animations.
and MGS4 it's just as good.
english not so much

Hmm... that, or you're being extremely opportunistic.