Forum Overview :: Mass Effect
 
Ex-Mass Effect dev dishes on why the facial animations are bad by Rey Mysterio Jr. 03/25/2017, 4:33pm PDT
http://www.pcgamer.com/ex-bioware-animator-responds-to-mass-effect-andromedas-animation-woes/

Cooper describes how RPG designers, not necessarily 'animators,' can work like DJs, mixing pre-made animations to complete important scenes, and letting algorithms take care of scenes that are less-likely to be seen—at least unless there's time to touch them up. According to his theory, BioWare "underestimated" the time required to hand-design every dialogue sequence, leaving some at a low, algorithmic level of quality.


"I've had experience in much smaller scope systems, and even those were a nightmare of organization and best-guesses," wrote former Volition, now First Strike Games animator Tim Borelli. "Instead of creating custom animations per line of dialogue and acting choice of the VO talent, you are likely creating phoneme shapes (Aa, Eee, Oh, Mmm, etc), emotion shapes (angry, sad, happy, etc) for upper and lower face sections, body language animations (happy, frustrated, sad, excited, etc) at various intensity levels (VERY angry, kind of angry, about-to-boil-over angry, etc)."


Borelli goes on to explain that many other systems interact with the animations: where the head is pointing, where the eyes are looking, and where the feet are planted, for instance. It's clear from every artist's take that the word 'animation' in a game like Andromeda should not be thought of as someone sitting in front of a character model making it move.

"I thought it was funny that people are piling on animators for these glitches, when in reality the animators are probably blameless," said Gwen Frey, who animated The Flame in the Flood and worked on BioShock Infinite. "On a AAA project of this scope most of the smaller cut scenes are never seen by the animators. Instead you create a system for designers to use and trust the designers to script everything properly."

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Ex-Mass Effect dev dishes on why the facial animations are bad by Rey Mysterio Jr. 03/25/2017, 4:33pm PDT NEW
    But algo and ml will solve for everything, says software architect NT by lmao! 03/26/2017, 11:43am PDT NEW
 
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