Watch dogs

Watch dogs

This talk was presented by Colin Graham, the director of animation for Ubisoft Montreral. and his talk was all about technical solutions whilst working on the game watch dogs, and how the company proceeded with the requirements in this day and age.

He opened by saying

"Are we ready for next gen games?"

challenge your assumptions and ask why

PS2 was going to render at 25 million polygons, this was the future at the time!

"there was a potential shift in the industry with the PS2"

Now the Xbox 360 and PS3 contained 20-40MB of animation memory. the amount of memory contributing to the smoothness of the animation. for example: hands floating through bars that are being held, or objects being held seem to jitter around due to the way the animation needs to be compressed to fit into these perameters of 20-40MB

But now with the recent releaase of next gen consoles this has all changed. the current animation memory is now 150-200MB!! 

"next gen has abolished any of the old constraints"

Why this will effect me:

in the past, huge sections of animations had to be cut or compressed, which makes all that hard work obsolite and as previously stated, compressing causes shifts when a character comes into contact with the world.

so if I were to get involved in the video game industry, this would make the work I do not go to waste, and the production of the animations more secure in having more memory to allocate more animations.

More memory means more budget which in turn means more animators.

Watch dogs used

98 mo cap sessions

4000 animations for UI

4000+ animations for the protagonist

5000 animations of the living city

The problem that we now face is that if the technology grows at this rate then games will be rendered at pixar quality, thus the budget will get so big that you will have to sell a hell of a lot of units to make a profit!

this might cause an end to the technology ladder.

"invest heavily into your first title, as you can re use animations"

when it comes to mo cap, the directors didn't tell the cast what to do, instead they created the context around them and the cast will give them what they want.

I'll benefit from this due to the reference material I have to use, as well as collaborating now I might need to get someone to be the subject of my reference so I can employ this method.

There is a distinct style as to how Aidan (the protagonist) presents himself, the way he walks and the way he carries himself. these are some of the ways they achieved it:

His hands are often in his pockets, but this boasts certain concerns, such as fingers coming out of the pocket. so when ever he puts his hands in his pockets they temporarily make the visibility value 0, so his fingers don't exist. this is a technique I could use if I come across this problem.

When he crouches behind a wall the back pack would often intersect the wall, so the solution to this was to animate the bag moving to the side to avoid this intersection, simple but effective!

A problem i might come across is the way they made the animations realistic, it was 100% mo cap, leaving the animator to 'clean up' so if this develops any further the animator will be made redundant.

here is what Ubisoft considers as the role of the animator

there are 2 types of animators:

Game play animators and technical animators

Game play animators are more technical "animators are creators again" the amount of input the animator has is all down to how well they use the tools and plug-ins available

this talk was very beneficial as it gave me a few challenges that could come to fruition in the games animation industry that I might have to consider if I end up going into that field.