Painterly animations.

[IncubatorGames]

Hello everyone.

I've been browsing through all these wonderful animations, many of which you guys created yourselves, and I was wondering if you could maybe answer a few questions about your craft?

I'm currently considering commissioning stylistic, painterly/comic-book style animations for one of our games. They'd serve the role of the occasional cinematic a la the original Thief games:

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<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/iUxsgmJv-2c&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/iUxsgmJv-2c&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Of course there's many ways to go about such things, e.g., Kamjar Fadai's amazing watemill scene (http://www.gokammy.com/portfolio/watermill.html) (is that waterwheel a separate CG animation?) Looking at these from a novice's point of view, I noticed a lot of common animation techniques that don't involve actually painting individual frames:


Camera movement/panning, with the occasional use of zooming.
Parallax movement, i.e., backgrounds composed of multiple layers that move at different speeds.
Character movement through framing, i.e., a character bobbing up and down by being offset relative to the camera's lens.
Lightsources such as beams of light piercing layers of canopy and illuminating the scene below.
Shadows and silhouettes used for frame-based animations in order to cut down on the detail. With shadows in particular, scaling and stretching can be used without painting individual frames.
Particles such as rain, snow, leaves, fireflies, etc. A few single frames of these can be scaled and moved at in different patterns to create much more variety.
Layered and rotation based animations, e.g., an arm lifting up using shoulder and elbow joints, or a character's eyes moving from left to right behind a character frame whose eye sockets are transparent cutouts.
Isolated animations that are combined with static frames, e.g., a headband blowing in the wind.
Smoke/cloud animations based on organic growth, scaling and changes to translucency values.
Water animations that show a current flowing in a single direction. Not sure how these are done -- although I'd guess it varies largely based on the overall style -- but I've heard luminosity changes can simulate this effect.
"Magic Wisps." It's hard to describe these, but I've seen quite a few animations where supernatural beams of energy seem to grow from a single point until they create distinct shapes. The magic wisps don't necessarily use translucencies or soft edges like smoke wisps, and no scaling or rotation seems to be involved. I'm not sure how this is done, but I'd guess that the animation is based on the finished object, and a series of masks that change to "unveil" it.

Aside from these, do you guys know of any other tricks or strategies for creating painterly animations? Also, what formats would be used for such animations? I'm particularly interested in whether it's something we could import and render in-game, or whether we'd have to use "pre-baked" videos.

And of course we're interested in freelancers/studios that specialize in such animations. If you have any in your own portfolios, or know others that do, maybe you can provide us with some links?

Thanks for your time,

-Radek

[egerie]

Considering animation is basically smoke and mirrors, you got a lot of the tricks laid down already. The videos provided are a good example of these, but anything that'll look pleasing and beleivable is fair game too. For instance, using live action footage and integrating it with the style of the animation can save up a lot of time too (as shown in both Thief's videos). The key thing here is that everything is in darkness. The action is suggested and cleary readable which is what makes it hold together.

I think all this has been done primarly in After Effects. Thus, you will use alpha able file formats (png, tga). I don't know if your engine would be capable of supporting this kind of complexity, but if space is not an issue, go pre-rendered unless you absolutely don't want any cut or load, etc. See with your TD :)

You might want to cross-post your freelancing opportunity in the Work section of the forums.

Cheers!

[IncubatorGames]

Yup, Thief used mo-cap and then blackened the shapes, which worked well since all of its cutscenes were quite gloomy, but I didn't mention it as it wasn't a viable technique for what we had planned.

I've also seen After Effects talked about quite a bit in this forum, so that'll be something for us to look into. We'll definitely be supporting PNG/TGA and other image formats that use alpha channels, but I think it's the lighting of the animations that would be most problematic (there's a lot more you can get away with when it's partly artificial and not done in real time).

I'll also most likely post in the freelance forums sooner or later, but I wanted to do some research first.

Thanks for your feedback.

[egerie]

Just so I'm sure we understand each other, by mocap you mean video, right? I dread to think someone having to characterise capes, cloth and everything dangly :\

-Aline, bumming around the forums while waiting for the engine to compile.

[IncubatorGames]

Heh, yes, I meant the video. You can see some of the cape/hood/mouth movements when it's just silhouettes, which I'm assuming was live-action footage edited and spliced with some of the static paintings.

[SCIBOTIC]

Oh boy, I use to do a lot of experiments with animated digital paintings back when I was still studying animation. The key really is using tricks effectively and minimizing the workload as much as possible.

Now plenty of good effects have been mentioned above but this is usually an exercise in problem solving, you need to lay out what you want first and then it will be possible to find the solutions necessary to achieve that effect.

Plenty of which could be done using real-time graphics, but again it depends on the effect you need.

[cout<mecha]

I know quite a bit about traditional animation and have had some success with combining various digital techniques. Have a look at my demo reel and let me know what you think....

http://vimeo.com/5411429

:yayca:

[jinxtigr]

I don't rate a demo reel but might get something together in the next year :) I did this in Shake's multiplane camera, first time I got it to work properly. A lot can be done just taking Photoshop transparencies and putting them in the multiplane. If you set it up right you get the parallax for free, plus the ability to do in and out tracking.

Sorry about the pitiful car motion- the whole thing was tossed together in a few spare hours.

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