Horizon zero dawn map data points8/3/2023 And that basically means that it doesn't look correct because then you still have a little bit of intersection or it doesn't feel like they're actually reaching and grabbing somebody steadily. “And if we have too low of a refresh rate on it, things actually can start shaking, for example. Usually we actually animate at 30 frames per second, but we are running our game at 60 or 120 frames per second where those missing frames are usually just being calculated by the PlayStation in this case. “he engine actually interpolates between frames. “You really want to feel that connection between people, and that means that we have to actually run those animations on a higher frame rate or a higher position rate, or else you will basically get a little bit of jitter,” Oud says. Oud explains that one problem is that scenes involving hugs actually need their animations to run at a higher frame rate, otherwise they end up looking ridiculous or wrong. Once the animators get their hands on the scene, still more problems arise. Oud tells me that means all three different endings of Burning Shores were fully keyframe animated because of this. But you can’t wear a giant head mount when you’re hugging, so animators have to fully animate the characters’ expressions by hand. Normally, as Oud mentioned, Horizon’s mocap actors wear head mounts to track their facial expressions and give the animators data to work from. The Hair Tube Physics ProblemĮven after that, the troubles aren’t over. Aloy and her friends all wear elaborate, detailed outfits, often with lots of decorations or other elements sticking out of them, and Aloy herself has multiple different outfits that all must be accounted for. If you’ve ever played the Horizon games, you can imagine this isn’t a simple task. So the whole animation after that point needs to be addressed so it doesn't intersect with the cloth that that person is wearing that they're hugging.” So you still need to go in there and start addressing everything towards the fact that somebody's actually reaching around a piece of armor, for example. “So even with the solved data, you only have the base. “If you look at things like the armor, for example, that Aloy is using… all that kind of stuff is not to be taken into account with the motion capture,” he says. Once that’s taken care of, there’s a second problem: motion capture suits are basically just a fancy second skin, but the characters hugging in the game are generally wearing clothes. Animators can’t touch the scene until this is done. It’s a time-consuming task that Oud says machine learning may actually make faster in the future, but right now either has to be done by hand in-house or outsourced to another studio. In this case, they have to solve for every missing sensor over the entire time that the hug lasts. Oud explains this means a human has to manually “solve” the movement data that’s been captured, meaning that the software has to know where a sensor should be at any given moment. This results in fully half of the sensors on each person simply vanishing from the view of the software. But when two actors wearing mocap suits hug, their bodies are pressed against one another…and so are the sensors. Mocap suits work through sensors dotted all over them, which software is able to follow and translate into recorded movement. The challenges facing Guerrilla – and other developers – begin with the motion capture suits used to record motion and facial expressions, which have become a standard sight in the games industry. WARNING: While this article's text does not contain spoilers, the video content in this article shows cutscenes from the endings of Horizon: Forbidden West and the Burning Shores DLC. Oud says that because Aloy is a hugger, Guerrilla’s gotten used to the extreme challenge required to get all these hugs to happen.and recently, it’s made some technical strides in the field of video game hugs. So how is Guerrilla pulling off this technical feat? I spoke with Guerrilla studio animation director Richard Oud, who admitted he was pleasantly surprised that anyone was noticing how impressive this was. And yet, Guerrilla has been making Aloy warmly hug her friends since Zero Dawn. Turns out, it’s very, very hard for developers to make this happen while making it look normal and believable. He was echoed in the replies by numerous other developers and fans, all of whom were struck by the realization of why we so rarely see two characters hugging one another in games. “that hug at 0:45 is a technical flex like YOU HAVE NO IDEA,” wrote Strange Scaffold head Xalavier Nelson Jr. That hug at 0:45 is a technical flex like YOU HAVE NO IDEA - Xalavier Nelson Jr.
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