Stumbling Toward 'Awesomeness'

I love this picture. It illustrates a few large problems with video games. One of which I have wanted to talk about for a while: Attachments of course. I am talking about the sword (yes, there is a sword, follow her arm to the left side of the image..)

Attaching props to a character that has to dynamically be seen from every angle through thousands of animations can be difficult. So difficult that people often give up. This was a promotional image for an upcoming Soul Calibur title, this goes to show you how difficult the issue is. Or maybe no one even noticed she was holding a sword. So let’s look at a promotional image from another game:

Why does it happen?

Well, props are often interchangeable. Many different props are supposed to attach to the same location throughout the game. This is generally done by marking up the prop and the skeleton with two attachment points that snap to one another.

In this case you often have one guy modeling the prop, one guy placing the skeleton, and one guy creating the animation. All these people have to work together.

How can we avoid these problems?

This problem is most noticeable at the end of the line: you would really only see it in the game. But this is one of the few times you will hear me say that checking it ‘in the engine’ is a bad idea. It’s hard enough to get animators to check their animation, much less test all the props in a ‘prop test level’ of sorts.

I feel problems like this mainly show up in magazines and final games because you are leaving it up to QA and other people who don’t know what to look for. There was a saying I developed while at Crytek when trying to impart some things on new tech art hires: “Does QA know what your alien should deform like? And should they?” The answer is no, and it also goes for the things above. Who knows how robotnik grips his bow.. you do, the guy rigging the character.

So in this case I am all for systems that allow animators to instantly load any common weapons and props from the game directly onto the character in the DCC app. You need a system that allows animators to be able to attach any commonly used prop at any time during any animation (especially movement anims)

Order of operations

Generally I would say:

1. The animator picks a pivot point on the character. They will be animating/pivoting around this.
2. The tech artist ‘marks’ up the skeleton with the appropriate offset transform.
3. The modeler ‘marks’ his prop and tests it (iteratively) on one character
4. The tech artist adds the marked up prop (or low res version) to a special file that is streamlined for automagically merging in items. Then adds a UI element that allows the animator to select the prop from a drop down and see it imported and attached to the character.

Complications

I can remember many heated discussions about problems like this. The more people that really care about hte final product, and the more detailed or realistic games and characters get, the more things like this will be scrutinized.

This is more of a simple problem that just takes care and diligence, whereas things like multiple hand positions and hand poses are a little more difficult. Or attachments that attach via a physics constraint in the engine. There are also other, much more difficult issues in this realm, like exact positioning of AI characters for interacting with each other and the environment, which is another tough ‘snap me into the right place’ problem dealing with marking up a character and an item in the world to interact with.