The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim's new animation system discussed
A new Skyrim podcast, video and developer diary delve into the improvements to Bethesda's animations, for The Elder Scrolls fans hungry for Skyrim fact nuggets in the run-up to its launch on Friday.
Even for the time, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion had slightly dodgy animations. Fortunately, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has a shiny new animation system in its revamped engine, with all sorts of motion-captured shininess, as developer Bethesda details in a new developer diary.
"We didn't want to have the 'one size fits all' for all characters. In the past, we had a very rigid system--every character, whether they were a bipedal humanoid, or a robot, or a quadraped, all had almost the exact same animation structure. And they don't move the same, and that was very limiting, and it just didn't make sense."
"We wanted to have a lot of flexibility to animate the characters as the animators wanted it," lead animator Josh Jones explains in the new podcast.
Many other topics, from perfectionism to animation conundrums posed by Skyrim's complexity, are chewed over too. If you're actively hoovering up every last Skyrim fact-nugget ahead of its launch this Friday on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3, check out the podcast and article.
If you simply want to look at moving stuff, and don't care about all the hard work put into the podcast by former Shack editor (and current Bethesda community manager) Nick Breckon, Bethesda's Sal Go also did a thing:
-
Shacknews
replyAlice O'Connor posted a new article, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim's new animation system discussed.
A new Skyrim podcast, video and developer diary delve into the improvements to Bethesda's animations, for The Elder Scrolls fans hungry for Skyrim fact nuggets in the run-up to its launch on Friday.-
-
possibly. it depends. the system requirements are higher. most likely, if you can run it, you will be playing it at lower settings.
-
[deleted]
-
-
-
-
In the podcast the animator that did alot of the mo-cap work, said he used a table as the dragon's head, and he would jump on top of the table and go through the motions of what it would look like if where getting tossed around.
Then he goes on to say he decided the player should go after the head of the dragon, logically, rather than attack its limbs or wings, essentially needling it to death. Instead he opted to just have the player animation be a head attack on the dragon.
-
-
In Oblivion, the absolutely weakest part of the animation system was enemies running downhill, their feet paddling in the air as if they were running on flat ground, the model essentially floating down the side of a hill. It looked so ugly. Does anyone know if this has been adressed? Has anyone seen Skyrim downhill running models? Looking good?
