Gene Endrody of Radical Ent., envisions using MoCap as an improvisational tool with actors.

Artists will always want and need new tools, but one thing that will never change is the need for skilled artists and animators. With MoCap becoming less expensive, animation is poised to benefit from some new thinking much as modeling and texturing have in recent years. I spoke with several game developers and asked them where they think game art and animation development are headed in the near future.

Gene Endrody, technical art lead at Radical Ent., believes that MoCap is going to focus much more on capturing improvisational moments. Endrody sees actors suiting up in MoCap suits and then improvising their way through a scene much like the actors on Saturday Night Live work through a live, improv scene. Endrody is interested in utilizing local actors, many of whom, he expects, will work inexpensively. Along with newer low cost MoCap equipment, this plan sounds feasible and may produce excellent results.

Shawn Robertson, lead artist for Irrational Games, talked about the future of game animation being more focused on realism. His prediction is that next gen games will call for very specific animation cycles that interact with the world rather than the more generic animation we see used today. Robertson used the example of a character running, becoming tripped up, attempting to stop the fall, utilizing rag doll physics to actually fall and then concluding with a canned rise animation. He believes that integrating physics with more special case animation cycles is necessary in creating convincing characters. His desire is not to get more realistic performances out of characters but getting more of a character’s nature across in how they move, in as much of the animation as possible. Much like his colleagues, Robertson is concerned about the additional time and budget needed for this sort of animation solution.

Shawn Robertson of Irrational Games believes that integrating physics with more special case animation cycles is necessary in creating convincing characters.

Ryan Lesser, art director for Harmonix Music Systems, and a frequent VFXWorld contributor, has begrudgingly started using more MoCap in order to meet the demands of console game development. Lesser agrees that MoCap is very good at recreating reality, and sees its strength for applications such as sports games. However, for the arcade game style Harmonix usually pursues, Lesser prefers the results a trained, talented animator achieves. Especially frustrating to him is the misuse of high priced, highly skilled animators in cleaning up MoCap work. Lesser and his team have had to bow to budget and time pressures and use MoCap to get titles complete on time. In his opinion, higher quality animation would result, and, more importantly, be appreciated by the audience, if skilled animators were given the time needed for keyframe animation. These realities are nothing new to the industry but are being felt more these days as expectations rise and budgets remain stagnant, and in some cases are even lower than before. Yet Lesser remains confident of his team. He believes that an artist is an artist first and a technical expert far second. Lesser prefers to hire talented traditional artists, whether or not they have computer skills.

Eugene Evans, vp marketing for Mythic Ent., thinks that as the quality of art and animation goes up, so does the price, and the overall cost of development. Evans says this is an especially important issue for online games such as Mythic’s Dark Age of Camelot and their upcoming Imperator. Evans recognizes that the visuals are the pull for most consumers and believes the industry must respond by creating more beautiful, detailed content. Evans sees larger art teams and even companies looking to Eastern Europe and Asia for content development. In Evans’ opinion, this outsourcing is as inevitable as Hollywood moving much of its production north of the border.

Rob McNaughton, lead technical artist for Blizzard Ent., spoke about developing huge AAA titles with development teams that are four times the size of previous teams. McNaughton thinks that along with the additional content comes extended pre-production, larger teams and more specialized artists. He sees game development following the movie industry in visual effects as being somewhat unfortunate but also inevitable. Rather than outsourcing aspects of a production McNaughton is in favor of employing large teams that are shifted around from project to project. This approach clearly requires much more high level, long term planning than what is traditional in game development. McNaughton cites EA as an example of this kind of developmental approach. He is excited about the advent of shaders for game development. Next gen systems, and certainly PC games, will utilize shader languages to generate more detailed, realistic content. The key to this content is that it will be developed by an artist rather than a programmer. Shaders can be very powerful. When combined with realtime gameplay the possibilities are inspirational.