Why do char models run so unnaturally (in most games)

Finvega · September 2016

It's the unnatural starting of the run, the body posture while running, the "leaning into the gale force winds" while running, the swoop-dee-doo foot shuffling sliding stopping... pretty much the whole package. Its like all of the development teams use the same technique for running animations.

For me, since most of my chars run a lot, it is has always been a turn off. It sucks, and I want it stopped now.

tawess · September 2016

1: Super smooth animations are expensive as fuck, not only to run but make.

2: We are way to good at telling when something does not look "right"

3: Sometimes movement is stylized in order to convey a sense of motion unrelated to the world around it.

Those are the top ones i can think of. Generally any human motion contains a insane amount of small subsets of things that move and shift. Animating all of that takes a lot of skeleton detail (the rig that let animators actually.. animate 3d models.) that in turn put pressure on the system running the game.

Then we have the problem of us the users being used to non-realistic movement, if we put natural acceleration and deceleration combined with natural turning in to a action game it would be unplayable.

Myrdynn · September 2016

biggest issue for me for almost every Asian based game. Their rogue/assassin type class always looks like its running at a 45 degree angle into the wind.

I played L2 for a while but really just couldn't stand it

Vrika · September 2016

tawess said:
Then we have the problem of us the users being used to non-realistic movement, if we put natural acceleration and deceleration combined with natural turning in to a action game it would be unplayable.

This. If starts, turns and stops were done realistically, then our character would always have to take time to finish the animation before responding to our next press of button. Not only that, the delay on response would always vary based on the position of character's legs at the time we decided to give our next command.

The result would be that we'd never know what position our character would move to.

Gdemami · September 2016

Vrika said:
This. If starts, turns and stops were done realistically, then our character would always have to take time to finish the animation before responding to our next press of button. Not only that, the delay on response would always vary based on the position of character's legs at the time we decided to give our next command.

The result would be that we'd never know what position our character would move to.

Yet, there are plenty of games with "realistic" movement and it is a non-issue.

"Realistic" does not necessarily mean "better" game play.

For some games more realistic movement is fitting better than others.

immodium · September 2016

Why only running? Does the unrealistic combat movements in most games not annoy you either?

Quizzical · September 2016

Because good animations are hard to do. Doing 3D graphics that accurately models the real world is completely intractable, so they have to do massive fakery of everything, with the goal of making fakery that looks good. Some games are more successful than others in making it look good.

H0urg1ass · September 2016

Finvega said:

It's the unnatural starting of the run, the body posture while running, the "leaning into the gale force winds" while running, the swoop-dee-doo foot shuffling sliding stopping... pretty much the whole package. Its like all of the development teams use the same technique for running animations.

For me, since most of my chars run a lot, it is has always been a turn off. It sucks, and I want it stopped now.

If you like realistic movements, then try out MMO's which have used motion capture studios to build their animations. For instance, Funcom owns their own MOCAP studio and they even did mocap for mounted combat with the little golf balls on the horses while riding through an outdoor studio. I'm pretty sure that a couple of the martial arts MMO's have also used MOCAP.

LynxJSA · September 2016

Running has gotten more and more odd as time goes on, and part of that is because of Motion Capture (Mo Cap). A lot of running is capture by someone running in place or in a relatively confined area. Even in a large, dedicated motion capture studio, you still have limited space to accurately capture a realistic set of strides.

Combine that with using a single set of turn animations for action, combat, and general movement, and the almost complete non-existence of heads/eyes doing nothing else other than snapping to the selected target, and it's just WORSE the past 5-10 years than ever before.

Mo Cap makes for great combat moves, but seems to make for some weird ambulation.

rodingo · September 2016

Finvega said:

It's the unnatural starting of the run, the body posture while running, the "leaning into the gale force winds" while running, the swoop-dee-doo foot shuffling sliding stopping... pretty much the whole package. Its like all of the development teams use the same technique for running animations.

For me, since most of my chars run a lot, it is has always been a turn off. It sucks, and I want it stopped now.

As a trained animator I can tell you the basic with character animation is the "walk cycle" which is basically looping the left step and right step animations. The running cycle is just a modified version of the walk cycle. After learning the basics of squash and stretch and creating a bouncing ball, the walk cycle is one of the first things learned. If the animations are done by hand, as in no mocap, then it becomes as much as art form as it is a science. Hand keying the animations is definitely art and can actually look extreme when looked at frame by frame. That said there are basically 12 fundamentals of animation that need to be followed to create good animation. When the animator starts to leave some of the those fundamentals out the more the animation starts to lose it's illusion of life. The reason an animator would leave or skip some of the fundamentals might be due to talent (light budget) or game design priority.

@tawess was close when he suggested it was "expensive". It's actually more along the lines of how much assets are designed or allowed into the game to allow for the amount of frames of animation. If you get a chance to see the behind the scenes or making of World of Warcraft you will see where the devs discuss the trade off they have to make with certain action and idle animations due to insuring smooth gameplay. There are many factors such as system memory, user input, network lag, animation blending, etc... that the amount of information and theory can take up several books to fill. I think WoW is a great example of an MMO that found the trade off and balance of smooth and entertaining animations and level of character control. On the extreme end, if you look at Naughty Dog's Uncharted franchise you will also see some amazing animation that is mostly mocap but also blends dynamic animation that is seen in how the characters interact with the environment.

TLDR:
It's a trade off and balance dealing with both talent and game assets dedicated to animation. When those too are mismanaged or too many shortcuts used then the animations will suffer. See LOTRO.

Theocritus · September 2016

H0urg1ass said:

Finvega said:

It's the unnatural starting of the run, the body posture while running, the "leaning into the gale force winds" while running, the swoop-dee-doo foot shuffling sliding stopping... pretty much the whole package. Its like all of the development teams use the same technique for running animations.

For me, since most of my chars run a lot, it is has always been a turn off. It sucks, and I want it stopped now.

If you like realistic movements, then try out MMO's which have used motion capture studios to build their animations. For instance, Funcom owns their own MOCAP studio and they even did mocap for mounted combat with the little golf balls on the horses while riding through an outdoor studio. I'm pretty sure that a couple of the martial arts MMO's have also used MOCAP.

They sure didnt get it right with TSW...That game had horrible combat and non combat animations.

Quizzical · September 2016

rodingo said:

Finvega said:

It's the unnatural starting of the run, the body posture while running, the "leaning into the gale force winds" while running, the swoop-dee-doo foot shuffling sliding stopping... pretty much the whole package. Its like all of the development teams use the same technique for running animations.

For me, since most of my chars run a lot, it is has always been a turn off. It sucks, and I want it stopped now.

As a trained animator I can tell you the basic with character animation is the "walk cycle" which is basically looping the left step and right step animations. The running cycle is just a modified version of the walk cycle. After learning the basics of squash and stretch and creating a bouncing ball, the walk cycle is one of the first things learned. If the animations are done by hand, as in no mocap, then it becomes as much as art form as it is a science. Hand keying the animations is definitely art and can actually look extreme when looked at frame by frame. That said there are basically 12 fundamentals of animation that need to be followed to create good animation. When the animator starts to leave some of the those fundamentals out the more the animation starts to lose it's illusion of life. The reason an animator would leave or skip some of the fundamentals might be due to talent (light budget) or game design priority.

@tawess was close when he suggested it was "expensive". It's actually more along the lines of how much assets are designed or allowed into the game to allow for the amount of frames of animation. If you get a chance to see the behind the scenes or making of World of Warcraft you will see where the devs discuss the trade off they have to make with certain action and idle animations due to insuring smooth gameplay. There are many factors such as system memory, user input, network lag, animation blending, etc... that the amount of information and theory can take up several books to fill. I think WoW is a great example of an MMO that found the trade off and balance of smooth and entertaining animations and level of character control. On the extreme end, if you look at Naughty Dog's Uncharted franchise you will also see some amazing animation that is mostly mocap but also blends dynamic animation that is seen in how the characters interact with the environment.

TLDR:
It's a trade off and balance dealing with both talent and game assets dedicated to animation. When those too are mismanaged or too many shortcuts used then the animations will suffer. See LOTRO.

And then there are a lot of additional complications. Even if you can make running in a straight line at constant speed look good, what about turning? What about speeding up or slowing down? How about on sloped ground rather than level ground? Running along 30 degree sloped ground is awkward enough in real life that we mostly don't, but many games make characters do so all the time. That's bound to look unnatural because it is unnatural.

And then there is using skills. What if you start to use a skill and then decide to cancel it? How do you animate that properly? Some games have an animation lock where if you start, it must complete. But what about auto-attack? Completing an auto-attack can easily mean that the real skill you wanted is delayed by a full second. And then what about updates where other players don't do what the game engine guessed they would?

Ridelynn · September 2016

Uncanny Valley also plays a good part into that.

Octagon7711 · September 2016

Quizzical said:

rodingo said:

Finvega said:

It's the unnatural starting of the run, the body posture while running, the "leaning into the gale force winds" while running, the swoop-dee-doo foot shuffling sliding stopping... pretty much the whole package. Its like all of the development teams use the same technique for running animations.

For me, since most of my chars run a lot, it is has always been a turn off. It sucks, and I want it stopped now.

As a trained animator I can tell you the basic with character animation is the "walk cycle" which is basically looping the left step and right step animations. The running cycle is just a modified version of the walk cycle. After learning the basics of squash and stretch and creating a bouncing ball, the walk cycle is one of the first things learned. If the animations are done by hand, as in no mocap, then it becomes as much as art form as it is a science. Hand keying the animations is definitely art and can actually look extreme when looked at frame by frame. That said there are basically 12 fundamentals of animation that need to be followed to create good animation. When the animator starts to leave some of the those fundamentals out the more the animation starts to lose it's illusion of life. The reason an animator would leave or skip some of the fundamentals might be due to talent (light budget) or game design priority.

@tawess was close when he suggested it was "expensive". It's actually more along the lines of how much assets are designed or allowed into the game to allow for the amount of frames of animation. If you get a chance to see the behind the scenes or making of World of Warcraft you will see where the devs discuss the trade off they have to make with certain action and idle animations due to insuring smooth gameplay. There are many factors such as system memory, user input, network lag, animation blending, etc... that the amount of information and theory can take up several books to fill. I think WoW is a great example of an MMO that found the trade off and balance of smooth and entertaining animations and level of character control. On the extreme end, if you look at Naughty Dog's Uncharted franchise you will also see some amazing animation that is mostly mocap but also blends dynamic animation that is seen in how the characters interact with the environment.

TLDR:
It's a trade off and balance dealing with both talent and game assets dedicated to animation. When those too are mismanaged or too many shortcuts used then the animations will suffer. See LOTRO.

And then there are a lot of additional complications. Even if you can make running in a straight line at constant speed look good, what about turning? What about speeding up or slowing down? How about on sloped ground rather than level ground? Running along 30 degree sloped ground is awkward enough in real life that we mostly don't, but many games make characters do so all the time. That's bound to look unnatural because it is unnatural.

And then there is using skills. What if you start to use a skill and then decide to cancel it? How do you animate that properly? Some games have an animation lock where if you start, it must complete. But what about auto-attack? Completing an auto-attack can easily mean that the real skill you wanted is delayed by a full second. And then what about updates where other players don't do what the game engine guessed they would?

Not to mention server lag killing animations.

Gdemami · September 2016

Octagon7711 said:
Not to mention server lag killing animations.

Animations are processed client side, nothing to do with lag nor server.

Quizzical · September 2016

Gdemami said:

Octagon7711 said:
Not to mention server lag killing animations.

Animations are processed client side, nothing to do with lag nor server.

The detailed animations themselves are processed client side, but the basic data on where characters are going and what they are doing has to come from the server. For NPCs, the server can mostly decide ahead of time and inform the client before they move, but you can't do that with other players.

Ridelynn · September 2016

Quizzical said:

Gdemami said:

Octagon7711 said:
Not to mention server lag killing animations.

Animations are processed client side, nothing to do with lag nor server.

The detailed animations themselves are processed client side, but the basic data on where characters are going and what they are doing has to come from the server. For NPCs, the server can mostly decide ahead of time and inform the client before they move, but you can't do that with other players.

Depends on the implementation.

I lag a lot on my ISP.

In a game like WoW - when I lag, I can continue to move my character about all I want and it continues to animate appropriately. Spell and attack animations get hung though (they wait for a confirmation from the server before executing), but character movement does not. Once the lag clears - the client goes in "fast forward" and updates all the lagged packets as fast as it can until it gets back to real time.

In a game like EQ though, when I lag, character is stuck running in place. The animation still processes, but no movement. Once the lag clears here, everything just warps/snaps to where it is server side.

In either case, the animation really has nothing to do with lag- but it does still produce some unintended results (either the fast forward effect or running-in-place/snapping)

Alcuin · September 2016

Well animated characters and MoBs are a pretty high priority for me too.

Games that, to me, have (or had) good animations: World of Warcraft, City of Heroes

A game that had horrible character animation (to me) is Lord of the Rings Online. The characters just seemed superimposed onto the world rather than being in it.

Ridelynn · September 2016

Wow has some good animations (running is good, most of the attacks/spellcasting are good), and some really bad ones (unsheathing/sheathing your weapon, dancing was great in 2004 but hasn't aged well, etc).

FFXIV has some incredible animations, I always thought.

Something about Cryptic games never quite looked right to me. CO and STO both looked really plastic or something. LOTRO did look odd - the graphics were good, but yeah, the animations were clunky.

Quizzical · September 2016

Ridelynn said:

Quizzical said:

Gdemami said:

Octagon7711 said:
Not to mention server lag killing animations.

Animations are processed client side, nothing to do with lag nor server.

The detailed animations themselves are processed client side, but the basic data on where characters are going and what they are doing has to come from the server. For NPCs, the server can mostly decide ahead of time and inform the client before they move, but you can't do that with other players.

Depends on the implementation.

I lag a lot on my ISP.

In a game like WoW - when I lag, I can continue to move my character about all I want and it continues to animate appropriately. Spell and attack animations get hung though (they wait for a confirmation from the server before executing), but character movement does not. Once the lag clears - the client goes in "fast forward" and updates all the lagged packets as fast as it can until it gets back to real time.

In a game like EQ though, when I lag, character is stuck running in place. The animation still processes, but no movement. Once the lag clears here, everything just warps/snaps to where it is server side.

In either case, the animation really has nothing to do with lag- but it does still produce some unintended results (either the fast forward effect or running-in-place/snapping)

That's just a question of what the client does if it has no clue what the server thinks is happening.

Gdemami · September 2016

Quizzical said:
The detailed animations themselves are processed client side, but the basic data on where characters are going and what they are doing has to come from the server. For NPCs, the server can mostly decide ahead of time and inform the client before they move, but you can't do that with other players.

Irrelevant.

Gdemami · September 2016

Ridelynn said:
Depends on the implementation.

Not at all, you are talking about entirely different matter.

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Why do char models run so unnaturally (in most games)

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