Character animation. It's an artform all about using poses and motion to bring characters to life. In fact, many fundamental animation books even have life in the title, like Illusion Of Life...or Drawn To Life...or The Animator's Survival Kit... of life! In any case, the video's gonna be great, because we're gonna learn all about how animators breathe life into the characters of a game. Alright! Intro time! Character animation has a rich history in animated film. It even has an official 12 basic principles of animation, already defined by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston in the book "The Illusion Of Life." Now, we're not gonna go through all the twelve principles in this video, but definitely look them up if you're interested in any kind of animation. What we are gonna go over are the basic goals for animation in a game. And those are: clearly displaying actions, creating believable motion and physics, and injecting personality. Alright, let's start with the first one! When you're playing a game, you need to know what's happening. The animator's job is to show when a game character is performing or reacting to an action, like showing when a character is running, jumping, dancing, or about to punch you in the face. A punch is a particularly good example, because animation is key in communicating the anticipation to an attack. It's often one of the most important things a player needs to know. Game animation puts a lot of importance on creating believable and impactful motion for characters. Whether it's a realistic game or a more fantastical one, creating consistent motion and physics helps immerse players within the game, and allows the player to predict how objects and actions will affect the world they play in. Motion and physics also set an emotional tone for a game. For instance, the movement of an enormous character can instill a sense of fear, wonder, and epic scale. While gameplay animation doesn't always have the opportunity for a long narrative scene, every action is still an opportunity to show who a character is, and how they are unique from other characters. In this way, an animator's job is similar to that of an actor's. A great example in "League of Legends" is the run animation. The job of an animator is not just to make a character run, but to answer the question: How does this specific character run? Preparation is incredibly important for animating. Animators will frequently sketch out their ideas, or do a bunch of research online. But oftentimes, the best way to brainstorm an animation is to act it out yourself. If you're willing to look a little silly, it's a very fast and spontaneous way to create accurate reference for your animation. Let's check out some animators acting things out. Alright, here we have an animator at work. So far, we haven't seen him act out any animations. We've been camped here for a few hours, hoping we can get a glimpse of- oh! oh! I think we just saw a spell cast. You can see how the animator is working through the action in his head, but ultimately has to act it out to really see how it feels. Here we have an animator setting up a camera so he can record himself acting out a full body action. He's going for it! Oh! He went for the fakeout, pretending to tie his shoe. Shooting reference can be...a little embarrassing. Let's wait for his colleagues to pass by. That's so awesome! Here it appears as though we have an animator brainstorming a full death animation. There's another animator in there! They're brainstorming together! Take note of their commitment to the craft. Woah! There's more of them! They're sharing ideas. They're giving each other notes. This must be how animators collaborate. Incredible. Animation is really just a series of poses, and so the first thing an animator needs to master is crafting a good character pose. So what makes a good pose? Alright, let's start with line of action. What is that? A line of action is an imaginary line that runs through a pose. When crafting a pose, you generally want a simple and clear line of action, and all the parts of the character's body should flow with the line of action. Broken or complex lines of action confuse the purpose of a pose, and make the character's action much less clear. A pose also indicates the distribution of weight of the character. Always check the character's center of gravity, and make sure it falls over the feet. If the center of gravity does not fall over the feet, they will appear awkward and off balance. Which could be what you're going for, if your character's just been kicked in the head. The pose can also show how heavy a prop is. The closer a character holds the object to their own center of gravity, the heavier the object appears. Holding a sphere way out like this indicates that it might be as light as a balloon. The same sphere can look as heavy as a bowling ball, by adjusting the character's pose. While its important to create poses that are clear, simple, and believably balanced, poses are also core to showcasing a character's personality. Alright, I made this pose of Garen... Garen! How do I give this pose more...personality and make it more specific? Being specific is often as easy as layering on some character appropriate adjectives to your pose. Heavy is a good adjective that we could use to describe Garen. So let's settle him down a little bit into a wider stance that helps sell that muscly weight. All that armor and giant sword are also gonna weigh him down. Maybe we went a little bit too far? So let's talk about some personality adjectives. Defiant and proud seem appropriate, so let's raise his chin and puff out his chest a little bit to give him some much needed confidence. On top of all of that, Garen is a noble of the crownguard lineage, so let's make him a little bit more majestic by adding some heroic wind to his scarf. Woah! This feels so much better than my first pose, and a lot more specific to Garen. Never forget why we fight. Alright, so we've gone through how to make a great pose, but animation also has motion. We need a good introductory exercise to demonstrate the basics of physics, and movement. What should we do? Let's do a ball bounce. Teemo can be our ball. Yay! Teemo bounce! Huh, this bounce feels...wrong. Why is that? If we track Teemo's positioning during his bounce, we see that the spacing of his position is very even. By adjusting the spacing of his position to get smaller and smaller as Teemo gets higher in the air, we give the impression that gravity is applying a constant force on him, pulling him toward the ground. Oh, wow! That feels way better! This type of spacing is also called an ease. An ease represents the idea that an object slows down before coming to a complete stop. Oh! Oh! And we can add some squash and stretch too! Stretching Teemo out when he's moving fast will give him a sense of inertia and elasticity. And then squashing him when he hits the ground will sell the idea that he's being stopped by an opposing force. Let's compare it to the old versions so we can see the difference. And that's the basics of a ball bounce. Thanks Teemo! [MUFFLED] Hup! Two, three, four! In games you can't easily predict which animation will play at any given time. Because of this any given character in a game is, in reality, a collection of hundreds or even thousands of animations interacting, interrupting, and blending with one another to achieve the final result that you see on the screen. Yeah, like you could be running and shooting at the same time, sliding, reloading, jumping from wall to wall, throwing a barrel, cocooning someone, slapping someone with a fish, sword fighting, paragliding while grapple hooking to a car, firing your pistols while doing a flip, shooting arrows while riding a horse, or even just mowing your lawn. And you're saying an animator has to deal with how all these things interact? That sounds really complicated. It's also one of the most fun and underrated parts of a game animator's job. Using a tool often a called state machine, animators build out how their animations will interact with each other, and what will happen under the many different possible conditions in the game. Oh, so this is how animators do things like blending between a walk, a jog, and a run animation based on game speed, or turning to face a nearby character based on how close they are, or blending a set of aim poses based on the mouse position, or reaching for handholds while in a climbing animation, or politely closing a door before getting into a shoot out. We could easily make a whole series just on animation systems. So make sure to get out there and research it if you're intrigued. The possibilities are limitless. Alright, let's review what we went over. Now it's time for some advice! Animation style! Something that I've seen a lot in myself as a student, and other students through teaching, is this inability to sort of, like, let go of your precious ideas, and the truth is that when I ended up in the game industry, one of the bitter hard things for me was the fact that I ended having to throw out so many of my own personal ideas in pursuit of better ideas, whether it be from other people, or just better ideas from myself. A lot of times the best idea may take three, four, five tries at the same animation to really get the thing you want. Something that I thought was very important when I started was the use of motion reference. I didn't do it for a long time and I always struggled to identify exactly how the body mechanics would work, or how the silhouette changed. When Istarted to take some motion reference, and started to get an idea of how the poses and the body worked, things became a lot easier to plan out in animation. Instead of doing things straight ahead like I used to when I started, just going through and doing a pose, pose, pose, pose, when I started to use motion reference, I'd identify those great key storytelling poses, plot them out on the timeline, and then it became a lot easier to manage. The advice that I wish I had gotten was just taking it slower, and not being afraid to keep things simple. I wanted to animate characters doing flips, and attacks, and other complex things, just to show other people how good at animating I could be. But that was kind of the completely wrong mentality to have. Animating complex things doesn't actually translate into good animation. Good animation is usually built upon really strong foundations. My teacher made me focus on the basics, doing the bouncing ball, but not just the bouncing ball. Doing heavy ball, light ball, fire ball, happy ball, sad ball, every kind of ball that you can imagine, and that immediately showed me in what areas I was weak at, and what things I needed to improve on. I did one CG masterclass in Italy, and then I did an online animation school. Being from a country that is not, doesn't have a big animation tradition, and doesn't have a strong game industry, will add lots of challenges to the challenges you already have to be a professional animator. I think you're going to find people that are going to put you down, but for one people that tries to put you down, you're going to find ten that maybe are going to be helpful, and they're going to be willing to, to see you succeed. As long as you're able to put a lot of hours of hard work into your craft, and into your growth, you're going to be succeeding. You're going to be landing somewhere, you're going to have a great job. Just be patient, and keep working.
