Early this year, the internet was
taken over by a very menacing, very tall woman. Gamers can’t
get enough of Lady Dimitrescu, her great stature and her very massive...
hat. And the answer why is obvious... We're all big rigging fans. Just like in real life, every player character,
enemy, or NPC in a 3D game has a secret skeleton. Unlike real life, probably, these skeletons
are made by artists in a 3D graphics software. Artists like Sol Brennan. They were a technical
artist-slash-rigger on Marvel’s Spider-man. Sol: But it's fairly safe to say if something's
moving, and it's moving in a more dynamic way, or needs an animator's hands in
creating it, it's being driven by a rig. Jenna: The rig is the backbone of animation. It contains a series of rigid, interconnected
structures (bones), as well as a series of control points and data about how they
should act in relation to each other. Almost every animation you see in a 3D game relies
on the rig for manipulation. Even rag dolls, which use physics-based procedural animation instead
of bespoke human labor, still use a rig. That way the body maintains a roughly humanoid shape,
even though it gets all wibbly at the joints. Even mocap footage needs a lot of fine detailing.
So if you want your game to actually look good, SOMEbody is going to have to finesse those
animations individually. And for that, you’ll need at least one rig.
Luckily, those are easy to find. Sol: So basically, most game studios will have a
rigging tool set that they built, or maybe that they bought and pay for, that auto-generates a
lot of very common components, right, like, as you said, an arm moves like an arm, you know, there's
certain systems that can be used over and over. Jenna: Some 3D software even comes
with pre-made standardized skeletons, which really cuts down on necromancy costs. On
top of that, studios will often reuse the same rig for a huge number of characters.
Aside from Peter and the bosses, the Humans of New York of Spider-man
consist of 5 character types. Keeping the number of rigs low can save a
studio a remarkable amount of time and labor, allowing more resources to be spent on customizing
those rigs with different meshes and animations. Lots of big boss babies in Monster
Hunter share the same bones, but fighting them feels different because of
the work that’s been done to customize them. So you can have what looks like a wide variety
of characters, all sharing one skeleton. Duplicated, of course, so nobody can claim that
mom says it’s their turn to use the skeleton. Even when a game has a medley of different
sized characters, the developers probably used a base template and customized it from
there. In Hades, most of the NPCs start as either Thanatoses or Megaras, the two genders, and
are modified to be smaller or daddier, as needed. A lot of those hell lords spend their time
floating in their respective corners, without doing much more than idle animations. For
other games, making multiple rigs is a much bigger commitment. While customizing a rig isn’t
easy, it pales in comparison to the time spent animating it, which means adding even just one
more skeleton multiplies your labor and costs. That’s especially true for player characters.
Say you wanted to make a male player character to complement your female main character,
and you wanted to make him smaller because we stan a short king. You can adjust the size
of a rig pretty easily. But a smaller skeleton means narrower shoulders, and hands that are
closer together and lower than before. Which means you can’t just reuse the animations
built for the original rig. Your character now clips through held items, and ladders,
and just literally anything they touch. Consider for a moment the huge number
of animations a player character gets. Gosh, that’s a lot of work! Okay, now
double that for a second character rig. Well golly, that’s twice as much work! This is why so many studios wisely build
their player characters on the same basic rig. Some customizers will allow a lil wiggle
room for characters that are broader or thinner or a TV dinner featuring BEEFCAKE, but these are purely cosmetic; it puts more meat
on those bones, but the bones remain the same. Although this is a great time-saver, it has a
notable downside. Default rigs tend to start out pretty thin, and stay that way. There’s an upper
and lower limit to what looks natural on a frame, so you can’t play as someone bigger or smaller
than that. And it’s rare that a game will let you play a character that’s truly thicc. When games
DO create a rig that can support broad characters, it often seems more like a punchline
instead of an acknowledgment that people just come in different shapes. So games that do let you control your height
or width, or have elongated legs or fingers, they’re actually super powerful, even if they
rarely let you be a full-blown 9’6” demigiant. And inevitably, these systems will have hiccups
when it comes to interacting with the world, because touch is one of the
trickiest things to animate. Sol: You either choose, are their arms going to
clip through the mesh, or are they going to float? And a lot of times, people err on the
floating, right? Because it looks better to have hover hands, than it does to
see obvious clipping through the mesh. Jenna: Which is why some wrestlers in the WWE
games get to have just a little telekinesis, as a treat, and why the touch-heavy cutscenes in
The Last of Us, Part II are a technical marvel. Sol: You know, they have scenes where the
characters touch their own face and push the skin of their own face. That is actually something
that has to be customly authored. There's no way of procedurally authoring that at runtime. Jenna: Any time any character interacts
with anything in a game world, it means a developer has spent time creating
bespoke animations to make it look right. For really uniquely shaped characters - like,
for instance, those too tall to just walk through a doorway - more attention has to go
into the animation. Which is why, of course, the internet is so into Lady Dimitrescu. We’re
just super into animation. We love a big rig. Whether or not the studio diversifies their
character mold depends on how willing they are to commit employee time and labor
into making a super hot tall-- I mean, to making everything look good. It’s a choice
that needs to be made early in the design process. For Overwatch, Blizzard specifically
wanted each character to feel distinct.
Jess Davis: If we had maintained this body type
size for all of our heroes, it might have been more easy for production. But it gets away from
the diversity of the cast that you see below. Jenna: That didn’t mean redesigning the wheel
for every character. They developed a workflow that allowed them to copy some animations, and
devote more time to adding flair to what they call “high visibility forms” - things like
running and Play of the Game animations. But Overwatch still has a lot of repetition in
body types. Despite a few really unique shapes, male characters are overwhelmingly a rectangle,
no love for the thick-hip gents. Female characters mostly have one of two silhouettes: long-leg
thin hourglass or long-leg thick hourglass. On the other hand, some multiplayer games
explicitly cannot have different rigs for different player characters. No matter how much
you customize your PUBG or Fortnite character, it will always have the same skeleton - and
the same hitbox - because otherwise a player might have an unfair advantage. Not to mention,
again, the massive amount of animations they’d need to re-do. Which is terrible news for
those of us waiting on Fortnite Babies!
This is why poor Oddjob is so reviled. He’s the
only character in Goldeneye 007’s multiplayer whose rig is shorter than the default gun-aiming
level. You have to lower your gun to have any chance of hitting him, giving the player in his
proportionally-smaller shoes a big advantage. So there are definitely times when reusing the
same rig is just smart game-making. Other times, it can really undercut your world building.
Cyberpunk is set in a future where body modification is explicitly a common practice.
Looking around at the people on the street, you wouldn’t know it. Nobody is rocking a
third cyber-arm or bionic legs that make them super tall. And Cyberpunk must be an alternate
universe where furries don’t exist because you know you’d be seeing wolf legs
and prehensile tails everywhere. Sol: Doing things especially like tentacles, anything that's like, snakes type shape
is actually a very incredibly difficult thing to animate, and animate consistently.
There are things that are difficult to rig, but a lot of the difficulty in rigging comes
from anything that's, that's not standardized. Jenna: “Not standardized” doesn’t just mean
additive features, like the fully rigged Medusa hair I’m still waiting for a game to
give me. It also means having characters that are missing limbs, which is pretty rare in
games. From a rigging standpoint, it takes a lot less precious time to replace a limb with a
prosthetic that functions - and animates - exactly like a flesh hand. Or, even better, one
that makes you a little bit of a superhero! The rig system means it’s much rarer to have
a character operating entirely without a limb, or to see a prosthetic treated like it
functions differently from a ready-made version. So even though it makes sense aesthetically for
Sea of Thieves to have hook-hands and peg legs, we should appreciate the extra effort
they put into the bespoke animations. And that goes for any time you see a
wee lad fighting a bunch of titans, or a seamless cutscene kiss, or just like…
a really BIG lady. The developers have made a choice to embrace a variety of body
shapes and for that I say, thank you.
