What Makes GOOD Animation (2B & Eve Analysis)

so we have analyzed the developers vision and the art style of Stellar blade but today I wanted to talk about something a little bit more fun and relatable to our field in 3D animation what separates good animations from great animations I think most of us know when we see bad animations but first let's distinguish bad animations from stylized animations whether an animation is good or bad is sometimes not necessarily super clearcut for example the animations in Minecraft are extremely simple linear and kind of unrealistic but they fit perfectly within the world they're in and they actually complement the game very well so despite them being fairly unrealistic I don't think most people would consider Minecraft's animation to negatively affect the gaming experience and that's why I think most animators would say they're pretty good now let's talk about good animations good animations in game generally fit the action they're trying to depict for example if you are doing an eight Direction run or walking animation cycle the rule of thumb is basically if the direction going looks like it syncs up with the animation that is playing then usually you're doing pretty good essentially it all comes down to communication does the animation that is playing successfully communicate to the player what is supposed to be happening as long as you do that then your animation's probably pretty good so how do we go from good to great well to put it simply a good animation will fit but a great animation will convey personality this is the difference between using stock and generic animation that you can find on the marketplace versus creating animations from the ground up specifically for the character you are moving a lot of games nowadays use allpurpose generic animations for every character this is especially a very common practice in first and third person shooters where all the characters have different looks and skins but they're all essentially sharing the exact same walking and running animations now keep in mind this isn't necessarily a bad thing and I am a firm believer that if your players are having fun then that's ultimately what really matters sometimes expressing the personality of each character really isn't that important to the game and if that's the case then you kind of don't really need to recreate all the animations but the power of personalized groundup animations is an extremely useful tool developers have and it should not be glossed over for example let's use the animations ofer automata it's a game known for its super smooth and great feeling combat and beautiful animations let's look at tb's walk animation simply a work of art I can promise you that the animator for this motion probably spent more time on this walk cycle than any of the other attack animations because this animation communicates to the player information about the character imagine if we swapped tub's walk cycle with this generic unreal five walking animation that comes with the engine how would that change your perception of the character It's probably hard for a lot of people to put into words but the reason why it would make a lot of people uncomfortable is because it would Clash with the personality of the character everything about tb's design tells you she's a beautiful feminine elegant and Confident Woman but if you see her walk like a dude from the streets now we have an animation that is conveying a completely different personality to what we thought we knew about the character this walk cycle is consistent with tub's personality while this walk cycle is generic boring and blank but it doesn't complement the character and this perception is hard grained into the human mind there's a dark study for those of you who are interested in where they took a bunch of criminals and showed them footage of a bunch of different people walking in the streets these criminals were then asked to identify which one of these people had been a victim of crime before or would you choose to Target and just by looking at how these random people walked without any other information most of the criminals could all identify who had been a victim before and who they would choose to be their next victim they could all tell who was weak and who was strong just by how they walked and how they stood that is how much information your walk and your standing animation conveys to people in real life it's literally a mirror of your personality of your past and how you'll probably behave in the future so if you're trying to take an animation to the next level consider the personality of the character you're trying to express so let's take this information and see what we can learn about the differences between tub and Eve's personality this is tub's [Music] walk and this is Eve's [Music] walk now just from what you see here can you take a guess and extrapolate what the differences in their personalities might be both are beautiful both are feminine both are confident but they're not the same and that's because their personalities are different real quick in the comments right now what do you think the differences are you done okay well let me tell you what the main differences I feel from watching these two animations 2B is more stoic she's more precise she's more methodical and she's more careful and she also feels a bit more mature Eve's animation on the other hand is more friendly it's more playful it's more delicate a little bit more relaxed and it feels a little more innocent to put it simply to be Moves Like a Woman Eve moves like a girl and that is completely intentional Eve's personality despite being a high- Tred fighter is that she doesn't understand the world and she constantly looks to other people for information when it comes to trying to understand her surroundings and every single movement she makes perfectly refle reflects this mentality which kind of makes sense because Eve in most stories represents the origin of all Beauty and femininity you cannot find Eve's animations floating around on the unreal Marketplace these animations were all handmade specifically for Eve and that's what makes the animations for her gameplay feel amazing and I would actually say the animation team for Stellar blade really outdid themselves here truly a fantastic job because every single character enemy and boss clearly have animations that were specific speically tailored for them the monsters all have unique characteristics weapons and tactics that really demand very different animations for example if we look at this one here it doesn't move anything like Eve at all this animation conveys animalistic aggressive Primal anger it's violent fast and vengeful even the fuing ground flailing animation attacks are extremely detailed now let's contrast that with the floaty squid woman enemy which moves entirely differently this enemy while still being extremely aggressive has a very different feel from the chainsaw head it's graceful it's feminine in nature it's smooth and precise you could not just grab a random enemy animation from the marketplace and dump it onto this enemy for the same effect if you did it would just feel very generic the same way if you gave this enemy a basic ogre smash animation it would lose all of its personality and ferocity and the entire game is like this which is why as a 3D animator myself I am phenomenally impressed hats off to the animators for this project because it's truly beautiful work so that is the difference between good animations and great animations thanks for watching hope that helped and as always hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you around

Channel: Royal Skies

Views: 307,708

Keywords: royal, skies, stellar, blade, game, gameplay, playstation, review, react, scene, cutscenes, theory, character, game dev, dev, developer, beautiful, beautiful characters, 3d, 3d characters, eve, tachy, adam, stellar blade gameplay, good, games, good games, perfect, amazing, smooth, fight, compare, comparrison, stellar blade review, animation, animations, 3d animations, 3d character, art, style, art style, artstyle, game art, philosophy, 2b, nier, stellar blade, stellar blade animation, walk, run, move, movement, automata

Id: eiz72pAR-Jk

Length: 7min 50sec (470 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2024