Animation Bootcamp: Bringing Life to the Machines of Horizon Zero Dawn

[Music] well good morning everybody so nice that you guys all showed up it's crazy how many people are here I wasn't expecting this many people right thanks Alana and Mike for hosting this I mean you guys have an amazing line-up and it's gonna be an awesome day so it's such a pleasure to be here and actually getting this thing off for those of you though don't know me I'm Richard out and I'm the lead animator guerilla games and the talk will be about the animation process of the machines in horizon zero dawn a little bit about myself I studied at the Utrecht School of Arts for animation and my main goal was always to become a feature film animator so my third year I was actually very lucky to have an animation internship at DNA productions during their feature film the end bully and that was such an amazing experience I mean I learned so much about the animation industry animation itself the workflow and I got to meet a lot of cool animators that eventually just sort of like spread out through the entire industry after DNA got closed down so getting back to the Netherlands and graduating I knew I wanted to be a feature and film animator but I knew my real wasn't strong enough so I figured okay let me just work on my own and hopefully see from there what will happen but I still wanted to get some of that industry experience and the only studio that was actually doing something was guerrilla games in Hamsterdam back then and it was like 10 minutes away from my house so I figured okay let me just at least send in my review and we'll see what happens and luckily enough they called me up and said yeah you have an interview and a couple of days later I actually got hired as a junior animator on Killzone the crazy thing is as soon as I started to work in game I just fell in love with that process so much that I knew I never wanted to do anything else in like 10 years later I'm still at guerilla game so did a little bit of finishing off on Killzone 2 but got to really get my hands on in Killzone 3 doing the first-person weapons and new ones and the brutal melee system that they had I skipped the Killzone Shadowfall because I was already working on the R&D team for horizon zero dawn the only thing that actually helped them out with just because the schedule was so tight at the end of shadow fall that I had to help him out with some of the cinematics but basically what the last five years of my life have been all around horizon zero dawn and recently we just finished the the frozen wild so that's sort of me in a very short period um I'm gonna start a little bit with how the project actually evolved on horizon zero dawn and the initial idea in the backstory and i'll shortly discuss some of the prototyping phase that we went through where we started exploring how these machines would actually move and out of wood how do we look but then I'll just cover a lot of in depth production of the machines with multiple topics like the team structure reference movement and the tech behind it and I'll finally end up with some of the Polish best that we do we did but if you're not that familiar with the project or users needs a refresher here are some snippets of the machines [Applause] okay so the world horizon long I mean how did this whole thing actually came about right and back in 2011 we just finished gills on three and Gabriel I really wanted to change the direction so we basically just went to Sony and said hey can we just explore something new and that you said yeah go for it which is amazing I mean basically what the studio did was they send out a mail and they said okay if you have an idea you just pitch it to us and you can actually pitch a whole game you can just pitch a game mechanic and then eventually we'll just pick the top three that we like and we'll start exploring those so roughly around 45 50 ideas got pitched in a week and horizon was already the one that actually was standing out from the crowd from the beginning it was just like such a cool setting and the theme and a majestic was amazing but it was also the scares wanted to develop because it was already a third-person open-world game from the get-go and we were just this first-person studio like what did we know right so we explored a little bit of the other two so there were three but then eventually we just ended up with horizon because everybody was just drawn to that thing and basically the pitch itself was nothing more than earth being reclaimed by nature and it's now inhabited by these robotic machines that are now the dominant life species and the gameplay itself was still a mystery at this point it was just that backstory that everybody just was drawn to so a guerrilla put it together a small R&D team of roughly around 25 people this is a couple from every department and we just needed to figure out what the gameplay was gonna be about him I was already the one from the beginning to actually start working on the robots right so since it was such a new genre for us we need we know we needed to get some new insights and for me personally I actually never animated a Quadra pet before this game so I had become an expert like really quickly and luckily enough animation mentor was doing this animals and creatures course back then where I learned tons about actually the approach of animating quadrupeds the workflow the rigs all the different gates so that was really nice and then next to that gorilla also hired a bunch of industry experts to start educating to give you some examples we had stewards amita over who is a very famous paleontologists to give us a class on animal anatomy we had Matthew learn from Pixar do a story class we had Scott Eden do a human anatomy course for example so that was worth like really nice sort of educational moments and also what happened is we had to get a lot of hires in a lot of departments so it was either for capacity reasons just because we were understaffed but also just because we had no knowledge of this game right so we hired a bunch of industry experts that had done these games already so they could just starts filling this up in the gaps that we were missing and last but not least study as much nature as possible I think I've watched every BBC nature Planet documentary out there but 50 times already and it was also like it was just getting to know the behavior but also the movement etc and you learned so much from this thing and there's so many cool nature footage out there that yeah that's something that we just did a lot during the course of this whole thing so like I mentioned we had no idea what the gameplay was right so we started with a smaller indie team just to explore the possibilities in our prototyping face and basically the prototyping phase was all the search okay what is his gameplay and the idea behind it was to go as fast as possible with limited amount of development time and see what works and what doesn't work and if it doesn't work instantly throw it out if it does we'll just keep iterating on it until we actually have something that's sort of like a nice gameplay feature and since our resources were so limited we basically had to work with what we had or just create some super basic assets so we actually started out with this Lego Thunder jaw and the player characters actually jammer from Killzone 3 which was the only female character that we did up until the point but we already knew from the first pitch that we wanted that female protagonist so that was actually something that we were very much pushing to to get the same end looking back at this is actually crazy how many of the initial mechanics made it is the final game I mean this charge is there as close combat and it's also super basic but I still like to see it even in this movie we actually already put in the option to shoot off the weapon off the Thunder jaw and then use it against himself with his awesome physics look at that so after playing around with this so after playing around with a lot of the ideas that we had just just took a couple of months we finally created our first proof of concept that we showed to the higher peeps of Sony and it looked like this and as you can see the environment is a little bit more fleshed out and we actually have a first property under draw model but everything is still very base again it's Bailey just a full playthrough of this boss battle using all the mechanics that we developed up until that point and as you can see there's actually traps there the play is already setting twit wise as well but in all the other stuff that you saw like the charges close combats etc etc is actually in this and showed this is Sony and I really like greatest was heading so they said yeah just keep going find whatever you want to see like what you want and then eventually this would like concept during into the reveal that you guys saw in III in 2000 time to shut you down so that whole track of the like so like finding the gameplay on the Thunder JA took roughly around two years to get right and the idea behind this if we can actually have all the states and mechanics and everything that we want out of this big big boss battle and if it's still fun to play we can just chop all the small pieces up and applied it to the smaller robot so there we go so that's why it actually took a little very long time and that was kind of frustrating sometimes but it definitely was a worthwhile in the end and so like during this stage as well I started to actually search what the style and movement of these machines were gonna be as well and during our four prototype plays my art director actually sent me this video and said yeah this is what I think the robot you move like and as you can see it's actually very jittery in mechanical and that's just because there's no like easy answer is out in the movements like it's all these linear driven cinematic parts that cause for a lot of overlap on this very unstable installation I know right so say but just because of the fact like that the movement is so unpredictable that's of like the thing that he liked and it's it reminded him of like this sort of zombie ass type of feeling through that machine so with that video I mind I started the prototype on this smaller bother we were creating back then which is also looking a lot more mechanical than ever the previous Thunder John unfortunately I couldn't find my initial test anymore but what I can tell you is that I never got it to look right it's like as soon as I thought I had something I exported it to the game and in game it actually looked at there was a framerate bug or like it was just a very bad attempt at stop-motion so I just started to tone it down and eventually sort of like found and find an in nice middle ground to this walk cycle that I made and as you can see it's a sort of like fluid motion but it's still mechanical and it does feel kind of creepy so I was actually sort of happy with this like let me just sort of like start iterating on this and then as soon as you actually go into higher speeds everything is out the window just because you have that fast movement it's almost impossible to actually keep this or like jittery mechanical motion and the only thing that I actually applied it try to apply to is Inlet on the chest and you just see it popping back and forth but it was just a like a last attempt of trying to get something mechanical into this thing on this turn-ons father tried it again but to me just became so like this cluster of movement noise to to these things and again in this jump it's just completely out the window so eventually I found that I was actually animating these things more and more like realistic animals with an occasional jitter or like not perfect spacing especially in the starts and the settles because that's where you can actually have a little bit of a windup time but it actually started to seem to fit the designs that we were making for the new machines as well to actually make a move realistically and it also started to relate to the player a lot more so if you look at this grace for example which was our first era forming robot that I started to animate that thing super close to or like a real deer antelope leather creature and as soon as plate that so started the ladies fighting against these things I actually felt bad to hunt them especially when they were limping out is a non looping sir it's not limping anymore sorry but um let me see well but that actually use up the fact that I actually started to feeling bad for these things that's actually something that was also incorporated into the story where a law is actually being brought up to be it's so like very respectful towards these mechanical creatures so that was so like a nice combination of elements of like coming together naturally in this process the only rows that we actually did apply some of the robotic movement to was the ancient world class like this Death Bringer and even here it was just because it's fitted the design the behavior more but on these things we actually started to look more at industrial machines like they using car factories since I have that nice combination of fluid motion and mechanical stuff combined so yeah so that whole track of so like defining the gameplay going through this pre-production phase searching for the style was done at this point and at the same time the rest of the studio was done with shadow falls so the entire team basically transferred over the horizon and from a production point of view it actually makes sense for the producers to have these dedicated team so we had a team robot we had a team a boy we had a team living world etc and the nice things for us was that we could actually only focus on the robot and that was the only thing that we had to take care of so before the team and she transferred over I started to make a list as a guideline and we could hold up to our own work but also made it very clear for the rest of the team what the intention of these things was and for me the first and foremost what was that these things actually feel like they belong in the world right so to make him as believable as possible I knew where we're gonna end up with roughly around 25 to 30 robots so it was very important to me that they actually all felt unique with their own personality shine through within their movement then the third one was that I really wanted them to feel bulky with lots of weight which turned out a lot harder in the end that I was thinking in the beginning because you can make him as bulky and heavy as you want but if they're not responsive in terms of gameplay your games suck so there's a lot of so like back and forward that we have to do in the end on this but I'll cover that a little bit later and then last but not least should be very scary to fight against so team robot this is sort like the list that was in there 3 AI coders 46 animators 3 visual designers do acid artist 3 game designers 3 effects artists do sound designers and that was always there to support us and even on this we had like three subgroups so two animators one designer and one AI coder was just working on one machine and we had three machines in production at the same time all the time so it was a very steady flow of creating these machines and the way we worked was very much layered and we had some multiple sign of moments so basically game design started with around fifty to sixty two pagers that basically described the basic functionality of the machines and what mix of animals they wanted to use as an inspiration and eventually the game director chose roughly around twenty five to thirty machines that he wanted to see in the final game and as soon as we had that information visual design actually had enough to start working on their stuff and instead of just drawing they actually went straight to ZBrush get bashing these things together to make mock-up models and once they had their first pass done it got into tech art to be rigged and we started to test it out and it became this so like back and forward in a loop between those three teams and eventually we had look sort of like that sign of a moment where the mock-up model was done and then a Siddharth could actually start making the high res model while we could actually start animating on the on a mock-up model and by the time the designers were actually done with that low level design which was like a 60 pager book world for like each robot individual and we could actually start animating the actual machines from that point on and as soon as we have like a good chunk of animations done we created the animation networks which is something that all the animators at guerilla handled their own and we handed that off to AI that she started working on the behavior in the combat and here we got like that a second circle of so like innovations based on feedback from all the teams and eventually once we sort like halfway through that production effects and sound design got to do their best and at that at the end of that track we had a alpha reading machine what we call then the nice thing from a production point of view was interval scheduling that everything had the staggered approach so everybody which is working one month behind each other so yeah I always had so like nobody was actually waiting for each other and we just kept on going without actually and ever stopping and for us and like for us like like I said two animators would work on one machine for three months and then we had an alpha ready version and that eventually ended up with 25 unique robots sort of like ranging from 120 to 350 unique animation super robot depending on how big the game design was so I think that worked like she turned out to be pretty successful for us so when we actually start a new machine of course like the first thing we started to do was to search for reference and sometimes it was actually really obvious what the real-life counterpart was we still wanted to keep into things with an open mind and that meant doing a lot of research and really keeping our eyes open which is where all those hours of nature footage really comes in handy so if you look at the bellow back which is a transporting class machine it actually carries liquids if you look at it and just break it down it's basically just a bipedal animal so but it's not your most obvious creature design so we just started to search for things like birds and kangaroos and I stumbled upon this really nice piece of footage of an emu so like fighting a kangaroo and the thing that I liked about is how much of a shape change have posture changes into that thing and it's so fluid and I really wanted to get some of that into the Bello back and in the design document and said that it actually needed to shoot projectiles and instead of just having a boring shooting straight animation I wanted to do something I was in a little bit further in the video he's actually doing this or like gesturing thing but it reminded me of him actually throwing a baseball so I figured okay why don't we just so like shoot like throw out the projectiles and that basically just turn into this animation so the rockbreaker this was an acquisition robot that had to mine for resources a resources on the ground and if you look at it it's basically designed at least I'm a visual design it was based on a mold lizard type of character but I know I never wanted them actually animate like that on girl on land and I had no idea what to do with a meter so we just started to work on the underground movement and actually the submerge type of movement which is all based on worms but I still had no idea what to do with him on land and then as soon as we had to make all those animations I was actually walking around the studio and I'm not getting like somebody was actually actually watching a nature documentary on their screen of these two sea lions fighting each other and the thing that I liked about it is how happy they looked but they actually still pretty agile and there was so much power behind it so I figured okay let me just do a test animation with it because it's still reminding me a little bit of that rock breaker so I made this test animation and showed it to our director say hey what do you think about this and then he loved the idea so the entire ground movement was based on sea lions from that point on so for the frostforest claw on the frozen wilds I mean this thing was clearly designed with a bear in mind and it was really nice actually had that posture change going from walking on force to going on a new bipedal stance so we started to look for a lot of footage of bears and we made a bunch of cloth wipes and a bunch of roars but it was all the meat was all very predictable and it never had that one characteristic that started to make this machine feel unique in my opinion so I started to think okay what else can we actually do with him right and then I remembered my girlfriend having this huge wheat weak spot where red pandas and I thought okay those could be interesting right let me just start looking for footage at footage and I found this piece of footage but what the base is doing this really cool rolls and it's also something you don't really expect out of the frost class so I figured okay basically like regular pandas but they're so feisty in there who actually can be really angry towards each other so I really like the so I just tested out some of those roles on the frost claw and that's actually stuff like the moment when I started to click with this carrot and I thought that was so like this was the stuff that I really wanted out of this thing of course I had to put a lot more weight on it but that rolling thing was that one thing that actually made him stand out from the rest of the machines that we had done up until that point and then the last example is on the long leg which is a recon class that actually used echolocation to scout for threats and in the design document there was this attack that was that said that I need to do a scratch attack and whenever I look at this thing and always reminded me of a very big chicken so just for fun I typed in the chicken scratch in YouTube and I thought this will be Kofi's footage they're so angry at that lady is like so I just straight copy that over to the door to make this animation I didn't even try to make something else out of it so before we actually start in the machine we really try to define what the main characteristics of a machine would be and we just took a couple of words per machine to describe the overall behavior and personality of these things and you're disappointed examples where we try to distinguish them as much as possible from each other so if you look at the watcher it was supposed to be you we're always so like curious and and but also very calculated and then the shell Walker who so liked this car go grab type of thing that's super protective of its of its cargo on its back we just wanted him to be very grumpy and obsess about that whole thing on his bonus back and then the stalker was supposed to be like this angry guy that's always so like into combat so it was just so like describing them with a couple of words everybody knew which direction we needed to go and as soon as we have so like a nice overview of what all these machines needed to be the next thing that we actually did was make personality videos which we call moving move like sort of mood board videos and this is not so like straight of reference for the animations it's more to actually communicate what the characteristics of the machines were going to be and to get an overall feel of the Garrett character going and it's basically just whipping something up really fast without spending weeks of animation time on their first and it was just a simple way of communicating the ID without just words or pictures so everybody select got a very clear view of what this thing was gonna be so finally now that everybody had a good idea what the machine would look and feel like instead of just going in and animating all the individual cycles and animation sets we started with something which we call the personality test and that was just to see if we can actually capture the personnel at the end the behavior that you just saw in the previous slides but then see if we can actually make a denim animation out of it and what you need to look at it it's like concept art but then in motion and the idea is just to come up with a short scenario and put all the characteristics in there and it shouldn't take you more than one to four days to actually make these things and it had so many advantages looking at back in retrospect and of course you can actually see if you can actually communicate the personalities personalities that we wanted out of these things but we also found that it was a lot easier to actually find your base poses this way instead of like forcing yourself to go in and out of with baseballs all the time these things were already working in motion so we just started the search for the the pose within the movement that time and it was also a really nice actually tackle some of the challenges and the design limitations up front so here's like my first initial test that I did with the watcher and to me it still holds all the characteristics of the watch I mean its alert it's super aware of its surrounding it's very curious and I just tried to get some of the group behavior in there with just posing a bunch of those guys around them but you don't need to move them but it instantly gives the feeling of okay these guys were closing groups and see if I can achieve play it again it's not looping but the good thing is if you actually break it down there's actually like everything is in there you have started in maze you have a cycle you have some of the gestures going on you have a run cycle so what I did I actually just chop this up and put it in the game and start working from there another example is with the grater and that was just more to actually get a skittish nervous behavior out of this thing that we wanted and again just doing a couple of extra machines around him to get that group behavior and that was basically it and I was very lucky that the effects had nothing to do at that point so that made this nice composition for me what I'll real-life background so that helped last example is on the stalk and this was actually to capture that agile and fast nature on that thing and again everything is just in this so there's a cycle there's transitions in this thing I was actually get up already there's an attack so chop it up put it in game and you'll be surprised how actually how good that works then and yeah the thing that I really want to emphasize is it's basically just concept art but in motion and it's really something that we try to do a lot so for testing in design so game design really wanted this sort of like crocodile type of machine and our art director was super skeptical about that and he had really big doubts about having that long of a body that close to are very sort of like crazy terrain that we had and also in terms of combat he was not convinced that this thing was gonna be fast enough to compensate for a go just running around him all the time and we'd have without having those like weird AI adjustments going on so I just started to serve and I really wanted help the game design is not because I actually really wanted to get alligator in there as well so I just started to search for how these things actually hold them up in nature when they're being attacked and they basically use their tail a lot to whip themselves around but if they're being attacked from the back like that they actually just whipped themselves over with with their tail and then figured okay that's actually really good 180 attack when a list any behind him so with this video in mind we did a little bit more of an effort on this thing is because we needed to sell the ID so we just waited a walk cycle we actually made a swimming cycle as well and then we also so like whipped out this little scenario of what it would feel like if healer was being hunted by these things in water is he gonna get her new and then I actually just straight-up copied over that move that you just saw on the on the video and showed this to our director and at that point was like okay this might actually work let's just go for it and it worked out in you and which I'm really glad about because this is still my favorite machine in the mini gaming and sometimes we also take this personality that's just a little bit too far I wanted to have this in game what the game designers really didn't want that so unfortunately so now that we actually have a good idea of what these carrots did characters are and what we can actually do with him it's actually time to start animating these things and how did we animate these things right when I actually started on horizon I just started to break it down into very simple shapes and the biggest difference for me between the two things is a human is basically this vertical capsule where there's like no lead or follow in the body it's just so like just running around like this all the time and a robot you can actually break it up into three sections so you have that rear end the body itself and the head leading the motion so if just simplified it actually looks like this right so if you actually gonna make these things move what do you need to never get navigate of course u-20 walks like nothing's looping of course is zero walk cycle but to get that change of path sorry about this guy's it's not bling no okay I can just tell you it walks like it walks walks around recording like that so you basically that 90 degree change within one cycle and when we put that in it wasn't actually enough for AI to start navigating these things in the world and as well as mounted action we basically just needed a tighter curvature for cornering so we animated this yes this one works so we had animated this 180-degree cycle so basically he's just turning 180 degrees from itself within one cycle and if you have those five cycles you'll be able to move your character around freely for just one speed so of course you need to make like multiple speech for these things and start and stop so it's not just like then it's done but I just wanted to point that out really quickly and it kind of looks weird when you look at it from a proper perspective come on nothing is playing anymore and go no no everything is good everything is good okay so so left corner of course the zero cycle the 90-degree cycle is basically back at its original position again in four cycles and the 180 one is basically back at its original position again in two cycles and as long as you keep your foot planting in your body rhythm consistent you're perfect for blending in the way we actually calculated the two trajectories and if your distance for one cycle is value X the 91 is basically just take X and divide it by half and then go to the same amount to the left or right and that's your end position for you 91 and then for the 181 divide X by four and double that trajectory and we just basically just drew nerve curves on on the ground as guidelines and make sure that we follow the trajectory exactly so today I can actually start calculating with these values as well and to really get that nice and fluid motion and really feel that change of direction you really need to push the poses as much as possible so if this is your zero cycle you really need to lean into that 91 and then even further in your 181 and if you do that then this is your end resolved as you can see that I captured that in our test environment and what you want is that the player actually feels that change of direction and how the head is actually leading the motion and the rest of the body is sort of like following into that lean and since this is all player control we also needed to need to get things right from an AI driven character as well and we were very lucky that they were fully invested into getting this thing right from their side as well and I basically had to rewrite a completely new AI mover that was driving these machines exactly the way as you see here where they would just make use of the full range of navigational and images that we provided for them so the basic logic behind the AI mover is that if you change your path of direction your forward velocity decreases while your sideways velocity increases and here's just giving a lot of commands to go to new spots and because of that logic it almost looks like the system is animation driven and at the same time it uses the full range of motion provided by the body animators and this way you guys get actually minimal foot sliding as a cornering and if you want to have more info on this Julian Burton is doing a stock right now in the next room and he's covering this topic like quite in-depth so go check it out in the vault it's really interesting and it's really something cool that he whipped up in here you can actually see the same system working on higher speeds where the marks become a little bit more visible because of that bigger radius and I'll explain what they mean in a more close-up look so when the eye is actually giving the command for a new direction the inner circle is basically the tightest radius that it can handle so that's at 180 degrees cycle and then the outer circles checks if the space actually available for the machine to move and it's also actually calculating the transition from going in from that outer circle to the tightest circle with the lachchi that I just described where forward and sideways velocity increases and decreases and the green line itself is basically the actual path that it's day again check out Julian birth Winston so our animations for the machines are all done in Maya and to create our animation networks we use natural motions morpheme and it's something that the animators actually take care of themselves in how so and had a lot of possibilities to make these robots way more believable with all the features in tech that it provided and I'll talk you through some of the setups that we made for the features that we wanted to implement and one of the examples we had to deal with was actually that along a narrow body that I was talking about with the snap ma so here's actually the example of the snap ma from the top the way we started and then she can see it has a lot of so like flapping in the tail in the body and this just looked ugly to me it makes the machines feel way lighter and less believable so we had to come up with a solution to counter this and the way we actually did it was the header blends and Federline's basically so like describe okay you can actually just take a bunch of bunch of bones and it will only influence those and so we just split it up at the three sections so if you change the direction the head and the neck actually play instantly and then the body is delayed by a certain percent and in this case actually six frames behind the original animation and then the tail was actually following even later so in this case it's 12 frames behind the original animation and it costs for a little bit of foot sliding as soon as you go into a new direction but it's actually catching up really fast so you don't know the sitting game and especially with our higher grass and stuff like that you don't really see it so but as you can see it actually feels and plays a lot nicer and there's way more way to this so we were actually really really happy with this setup the second example is actually getting rid of the random cycle I feel like like you don't want out of the carrot then it started to become really obvious to us with the machines once we were actually writing this writers whenever you were just so like behind it you could just see that it was a cycle and instead of actually using physics we felt that we would have more control over the whole setup if we actually create a bunch of extra cycles and have morphemes of like in a randomizing setup play the animation so if you look at this thing the middle one is basically your vanilla straightforward cycle and then I made two variations on the left and the right where the body so like tilting sideways but also the legs actually go underneath him from left to right as well and with these three animations we plug those into more into more theme and as you can see that right there in a high-end red highlight that they're put into his blend node and we have this random node that actually gives a value a value randomly and in this case we set it to one point two and minus one point two and it changes every one point five seconds and that number gets smoother down through this smooth node and that sort of like actually what's driving this blend node and it's actually constantly being updated so that's actually determining how much of the game animation are being played and here you can see the whole setup in action and as you can see the blend node is constantly changing the value because of the two nodes in front of it mixing all the animations together and this is basically just enough to make it feel to believe like a believable character and instead of looking at this random cycle all the time and you can just see a little bit of the the food like going in and out underneath him right there for example and again it's really nice so uneven terrain I mean of course we knew we gonna have like this really crazy terrain that we had to deal with and my plan was always to create slope up and slope down animations but since our schedule was so tight and we had to animate 25 row but there was just no way that we could actually make those anymore so the uneven terrain notes in that are available straight out of morpheme worked way better than expected it took some extra corners for us to get there but once we have the way we wanted it it had really nice results and to me the only downside is that we're actually missing friction so when you're running up and down the hill I mean you want to feel that friction and it's not in there but it's just one of those faders that you had to make when you make it game this big so this is like the setup in a nutshell with and without going through in depth in all the operating calculations the colored skeleton that you're gonna see is the original animation right there and then the white skeleton is basically the end result when with the terrain prediction on and as you can see you can actually solve some really extreme angles and what happens is that we we get the slope and lateral angle from for race fears that we have in our physics rig and it's basically on front on the back and then to on the sides and those values actually drive the hip high K and the chest like a and this come actually standard in morpheme so that was really nice but besides actually just adjusting the height to the terrain we also counter the body to the terrain angle so if you're standing against the hill like in this example you your body basically gets pushed forward to readjust for the center of gravity and vice-versa as well when you're standing downhill you want to be able to transfer your body backwards and then for the feet itself we use the terrain prediction setup and these are basically just for raycast being used from under the ball of the feet and they just snap the feet to the ground the only thing is what we ran into is that the terrain prediction is basically a tube on my case offer and more from is just made for humans and not for creatures so we just had to get this three bone I case offers just especially for the back legs right because I mean they have a different set up so we came up with this in a new way so we put actually we put helper joints in our rigs and next to that our tools department actually rode and something that we call an EndNote and it's all based around the following theory if you look at the back legs of a quadruped at basically the femur and the metatarsal staying close to parallel to each other it's basic like a folding chair going in and out all the time and it's both in stretched and in squash squash position so with that in mind we created these helper joints in the back leg which you can actually see highlighted in green in the movie and the idea behind the helper during to us to actually create a to bone like a software that supports the three bone setup and the length of that first helper joint is basically a and C combined and that actually always stays parallel to join C so that actually helped us to determine what the maximum stretch of this thing was going to be and next to that like I said our tools apartment actually wrote an EndNote in morpheme and what the NL did was try to keep the same angle between the joints all the time so it doesn't really matter if you have three joints or like ten joints or 15 joints is always tried to keep the same angle on every joint which is based on that theory you'd like I said with the folding chair so if you have those two combined we were actually able to snap the feet to the earth to the terrain and it actually was holding itself pretty well without just going nuts all over the place and with these weird angles in the knees and in the ankles and stuff like that so in the last example that I want to show is how we had to work with longer necks when dealing with I look at target said what was being set by AI and basically this wasn't really working out so we first made everything for animation driven and it was causing for a lot of problems so normally when you actually look for example make a turn on spot is you want the heat that they had to actually lead the action and show the intention of the machine right but since I look at targets being set from the direction by the route point is pointing which is that yellow arrow that you see in the top view you can see that the head is already far more rotated from the position where the root bound is so we ended up with getting this dog double calculated rotation on the neck as you can see in here and it's always often it's sometimes it actually turned inside of its own body so this wasn't really working out for us and then the solution that we actually tried after this was to have a fully overridden and a I K system but that basically ended up with losing all the data on the neck so we had a really nice animated body and then the neck was just completely static so that wasn't really working out either and eventually we came up with the solution of adding additive rotations on the joints to replace or I case system so we basically still animate our robots like you saw in the first example but then once we were done with an animation we just basically just took out all the z-rotation on the neck so it looks really weird like this but he busily just end up with up and down and tilt animations on your neck and a I programmed and in such a way that the target is actually being set before they play in action so they had a still leading the motion the only thing is that it's AI driven instead of animation driven so and if we actually needed a full control over the head in the neck we had this thing in our markup files where we could actually say disable the head i case system that way we can actually blend in and out of the the head iCade and then you basically just end up with this result and it's basically just a I set in the target and we also took out the the neck rotation and on all these 90 degrees and 89 180 degree cycles so we could actually really keep that focus on a low SS or likes waving around or to really get that predatorial feel on the machines and here's a quick overview of the set up in morpheme so again the colored skeleton is better your original animation and the white skeleton is a result after the target is being said and as you can see we're not just affecting the neck but also the chest and the spine to some degree so you have that really nice lean into the motion when the looking left and right so once we so like had our animation blocked out and like all this tech was up and running we could start our polish bass in the beta period and because the game had such a long track we knew a lot of balancing and tweaking needed to happen near the end of the project so what we did it was just blocked in the attack super rough and made sure that all the movement and gestures and the hit reactions were already pretty much done by the time we actually hit alpha so at that point we could basically focus our beta phase only worrying about polishing these attacks and making sure that this was happening while the tweaking and the balancing of the game is happening as well so the goal of the attacks of course like what any game is make look clear and readable from any angle but we really started to look at it from a front perspective since like 85 to 90 percent of our attacks are being played from a front perspective so we really wanted to get that asymmetry in and opening up the body from that perspective so here's an example of like the earliest bite swipe of the ravager and it's not the prettiest animation but it works for game design it basically has the anticipation that they want the forward movement and distance and also the timing for the settle but if you look at it from a front perspective there's basically no sense of forward motion in this thing whatsoever and it all looks very boring and symmetrical as well and the thing that I hated the most about this thing is that you're actually losing the weight and then jump forward it just gets transferred so quickly so when we started polishing and it became like this so when I open up the character in sideways to make the body a lot more readable but then I put in a moving anticipation instead of like that holding anticipation so we're closing the gap already so we can actually add a lot more weight into the jump since we don't have to cover that much ground anymore and we really started to look at clear lines of actions so in this case it's very clear from screen right the screen left and in the end just add some character which is with a little head shake and then you have your polish version again open up the machine close in and then have that really nice clear line of action and then a nice way to jump in there so yeah like I said very clear from every angle now the big step for the long leg same trick right it's super boring to look at but it does the trick for game design to start testing out the combat and it was also very easy for us to just like adjust this within a couple of minutes and then put it back in game again so that they were happy with all the timings and and distances and stuff like that but once we sparked start polishing it I opened up the character again from the start for a better silhouette and then follow up with that nice clean line of action going from screen right the screen left and if you look at it from slow motion open up the character close in really present what you're gonna attack with and then strong line of action to the finish the job and nice way to jump again right and then this is the end result in game and as you can see I really so like emphasized and motion going upwards and then so like keep the same angle that he's going in just because the player actually might miss the attack since they're dodging or there's so much effects or Vegas being projected on the screen that they might miss a saw as long as you so like keep that swiping motion upwards the play still registers what's going on and then the last example for the tail swipe on a snap mod this was actually a lot clearer from the start already when I look back at it but I really wanted to push that swiping motion in terms of that tail being whipped so this is what it ended up with an S you can see the tails already coming up from a front perspective sort of player I get to see what's coming and then I open up the that character completely right there before he actually slams down again and the difference biggest difference act that game design actually wanted this thing to face forward instead of with his back towards a boy again so we added that turn in as well in the air so again completely present the tail strong poses and then finish off with a strong line of action so that it's always clear what's what's happening towards the player and that turn and then this is your end resolving game and even like effects is actually emphasizing these attacks with all the motion trails going on so even though there's so much noise going on hopefully the player just always registers what's what's being attacked with and what the attack actually is basically 80% of the polish was spent on this so we just went through every attack for every machine and just let me started to break it down okay what is it that we want to make clear start looking from the front angle and and really start polishing things up from there and also since there was so much balancing going on this is where you can actually really start playing around with your animation and we just broke it up with the three sections so anticipation that that can settle of course and that's where you can really start playing with your timing and spacing and basically the remaining twenty percent was spent on whatever looked out of place or whatever wasn't up to standards and to give you this one example of that one of the issues we actually ran into was that the machines were way too overactive and at the movement was actually too big as well so the hardest part about that was that the weak spots almost became impossible to shoot for the player so both AI and animation had to tone it down very drastically and even if we were pretty happy with the movement sometimes if the players at that time your bestie is screwing up as an animator and developer so you have to really take care of that and it was really obvious in the corruptor so I show you that and this was actually the initial initial walk cycle and since I knew this was going to be one of those ancient work last type of machines I wanted to get something else out of him then that realistic animal type of feeling so to me oh let's see if I can actually play it again you just go back and forth okay doesn't matter but the hardest part for me like with the way that up and big up and down was it became impossible to actually shoot that drum barrel on top of its head so as soon as I sort of like implemented this into the game like within half an hour to game director sitting next to my desk and said I had to take it out instantly because he hated that thing as soon as he was aiming at the drum barrel the corruptor would stop and then we just pop up again and then he would just shoot into nothing so we had to tone it down drastically and then let's see if it actually plays I'm gonna see if I can in slide showing yep so this is what we ended up with and it still has some of that up-and-down motion in there but we completely took it out almost and the only way that we could so like counter this is would actually rotating the body forward to still have some of that motion in there but if you look at the drum bearing you're aiming at it it's always gonna stay inside so yeah he was way happier with this one than the previous one so we just went through all the cycles as well and made sure that the weak spots were always still pretty clear to hit from a player perspective as well so some of the takeaways first and foremost like you saw with the Lego Thunder jaw you don't really need anything fancy to prove your gameplay it's something that we hadn't done much up until this point but it helped us a lot focusing on the gameplay first before we started to make things look nicer and that really helped us out in the end the second is to really do your research and really go into things with an open mind it really helped shape the character a lot more creative but it actually makes a character also a lot more believable and the thing that actually really helped us out the most was if we actually took some time out to test our characters so I'd really advise everybody to take three weeks out of your schedule and start making those personality tests and start making those mood board videos so you have a really clear plan in mind before you actually start animating these things and you're basically just finding your character actually going through it because that wasn't really working for our out for us in the end and last but not least all the details in all the polish that we put in it really matters it really makes a difference and hats immersion for the player that was in sorry for all those scratches guys havin no idea what was [Applause] I made anytime right yeah good do we actually have a Q&A question thing right now okay anybody has any questions oh there's mics in the middle apparently yes in there oh yeah hi hi there oh hi so when you showed the production toward the beginning you show the production sort of cycle of the design and the nanometers and the feedback is that something that you kind of found in retrospect that that's how it worked or that was the plan no it was actually that was actually the plan so like the first thing that really helped was actually creating these things already in ZBrush so for for like a siddharth you know what I mean so we actually had our models pretty fast and pretty clearly already from the start and then that whole Trek so like started happening and then we just found I mean there's like AI can start if we don't have anything and it's so like started to evolve naturally from from a beginning point of view you know what I mean because we have to have something animated before they can actually start implementing things so the first ones were a little bit longer but once we had like three sort of like going into production it just happened naturally from there on some cool thank you hey Richard hey Murr real quick did you guys level design standards like slope extremes arena sizes and if you did when during development was that established gotcha okay we didn't this so it's one of the okay so the the thing is like that and I'm not quite sure that you probably can find this on the vault as well but a lot of the world of Verizon was actually auto-generated in the beginning and we just had to deal with it up into a certain point so basically I think in our nav meshes there's only to a certain degree that the robots are allowed and so I think it's like 40 percent or something like that and then after that they just stop that the math net mess just stopped so we just had we knew we had to deal with so we can actually find what what the most extreme angle was that we had to like deal with but then yeah we had to deal with it there was no way around it but for like I think for from a player perspective it they actually did establish a lot of the angles up front already but for the machines we just have to deal with it there unfortunately I hope that answers the question okay hi so for the strike teams where the team's dedicated on like a per monster basis where they'd follow it through all the way from start to finish or is it more like an assembly line where different parts were handed off down the line to the teams okay so during the alpha phase it was actually very dedicated so two animators were working on one machine for three months and they weren't working on any of the other machines after alpha so that that polish everybody was picking up whatever was available that's at that point so everybody was so like working in every machine at every time the only thing that we did do was we really started to focus on a machine for like two to three weeks make sure that we went through all the attacks and then showed it to our art and animation director back then and he just gave feedback and then we just saw like as a team did an entire feedback loop again on the same machine and then we just started going on another machine afterwards so that way we like looking back in retrospect it would probably would have been nicer if we still like switch things around on the other hand it's also very nice that you just get to focus on one machine for like three months in a row and you don't have to think about anything else and you really get the the feeling of the character after like the first week or two or something like that and then it's just making things nicer and better from there on so I think it actually there's some sort of like pros and cons to tippin's yeah one more oh there's only two more standing okay quickly great job on the game by the way thank you appreciate that I have a question a little bit more technical like this uh how did you account for design changes you know like like all the mechanical bits and pieces like the I imagine they probably changed throughout each creature design and not really no that's what about that whole mock-up model process was for so like funny enough game design was actually really dictating a lot of these things from the get-go so they said okay we we have this machine in mind and like they gain at 60 page design document that I told you about everything is in there so all the weak spots that I wanted needed to be on there all the weapons etc all the all the attacks but then as soon as we did those mock-up reviews those were like the first things that we really started to look at and then as soon as we had that mock-up we just implemented like we exported at the game so they could actually start feeling what the size of the creature wanted to be as well the only thing that actually happened was some of the machines were too small in the beginning and we had to scale those up afterwards and that was so like a big hassle because you have to completely react sport everything again at cetera et cetera but actually changing the weak spots those were actually pretty much set from the from the start yeah so then every once in a while we got something eventually once we had the high-res model in there we did change a little bit become but that was more for readability but not in terms of gameplay I can I can to like think back towards its owner thank you you're welcome one more yeah you were talking about how you use a lot of references like yeah video references like how do you decide which one of which part of the crazy mo fighting the kangaroo to use in your animation or what part not to like what was your approach to copying or taking pieces from those references so that was more sort of work I could I knew we had to animate something and and I so I started the search for things I like with that shooting thing for example and you we wanted to have like we need to the shooting animation and I just look more like a video reference like the first thing that I actually start to look at more it's like okay what's the energy that's being but what energy does sakera to have instead of just sewing like so like going through it's like I just got a copy this like favorite frame you know what I mean so as long as I sort of like like the energy or like what's going on on-screen I'll just take that as a base first and then just start working from there and then just test out like either with a couple of poses or just like a really quick animation testing and to see if it does work or not and then just get going from there but it was most of the time it was very specifically that we started searching for animation or for reference / animation basically um does that answer a little little bit or the process of looking for a reference like how did you translate that reference into your animation like what we're this Pacific what you're looking at the speed what are you looking at that that's like that's different on any vide like any references like so sometimes like I said like with the chicken thing I just straight copy that over so I just went to frame by frame and took all the poses and then eventually that that's what like what I had as an end result but sometimes I just look at like I said like an energy or whatever or then it's so hard to explain sorry it's just like a case-by-case thing like it's not so like always the same you know what I mean is that I don't think that answers your question I've no idea what to say about it to be honest like how I can explain that sorry what I got from you just like from every single one of them you just pick what animation or what energy or what movement you want from it and just like yeah yes like it's so hard too because sometimes I decide just I'd already know what I want then and I don't even look for reference and then every once in a while I just they have no clue and then I just start looking for videos and see if I can actually find something cool and see that I like oh yeah I like that a little bit and then oh yeah I like a little bit from that and then it's take a couple of videos and start mixing and matching those and then eventually you have that end result so it's always different for every animation that I make some no I mean that the samurai wanted to know there was like a logic behind it or it was no there's no logic for a chaotic process no logic whatsoever that was they right I'm sorry I thought that we have to cut it I think so okay oh yeah you can ask me after

Channel: GDC

Views: 39,936

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, horizon zero dawn, Guerrilla Games, sony, ps4, animation, game animation

Id: 50mIKB-NACU

Length: 58min 5sec (3485 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 27 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Crasp27]

Noticed this 3-week-old video hadn't actually been posted yet. Great talk/presentation given by Richard Oud of GG about animating the machines in HZD. Some cool early footage etc too.

[u/Hares123]

That stalker animation... I wished that was in the game, straight-up murders you. Maybe that could be an improvement for the machine on the sequel, I find it entertaining and far more dangerous when certain mechanics that the character has can also be applied to the enemies. This is why the Stalker was such an amazing experience and enemy... he could be stealthy and attack me the way I usually attack other machines, he could snipe me, approach me and use melee attacks. Give the stalker a critical! give it a silent strike! I want to be murder by it...

[u/Tempest116]

Thanks for this. I'll watch it when I get home from work.

[u/Slow_mess]

That machine at 10:22 looks sick af, I hope it will be used somehow in the sequel

[u/seq_0000000_00]

Awesome, def watching over the holidays.

[u/Spontaneousamnesia]

Thanks for sharing. Now I'm looking for more related videos to watch. I love learning about what devs do and how they bring the games to life.

[u/orangen-blu]

I don't know anything about game animation, but this was absolutely fascinating! Thank you so much for sharing it!

[u/SomeDamnAuthor]

GDC is such a beautiful thing

[u/nightfell]

Nice find, thank you for bringing it to our attention! BTS stuff is so much fun to watch and adds that whole other level of appreciation for the folks who work so hard to make the games immersive yet memorable for players.