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[militant agnostic]

Just realized this a few minutues ago and have been checking around to see if anyone else noticed it to as well.

So far I seem to be the first.

When you get a drink at the bar in the hanged man Hawk uses the EXACT same drinking animation that Shepard uses in ME2. He even pulls away from the counter the same way.

[John Epler]

Each project has its own motion capture and animation budget, and there comes a point where you make the decision between 'do we get a bunch of new generic animations?' or 'do we use custom animations for the high-impact scenes?' Sure, we could have gotten new drinking animations, but that would've involved losing assets elsewhere for what may have amounted to a slightly different 'here's a drink, now pretend you're drinking from it' animation.

That's not to say that we don't want to try and use new assets where we can. Evaluating and planning replacements for the 'old' animations that either A) look less than spectacular or have been used to death is an ongoing process.

But when the choice comes between 'make this emotional moment work by using a custom animation for its participants' or 'make it so when your character has a drink at the bar, it looks nothing like Mass Effect 2', I tend to fall pretty heavily on the side of the emotional moment.

EDIT: I should mention - there are animations from Jade Empire in ME. There are animations from ME and DA:O in ME2. Our animation library is shared across all projects, and when a cinematic designer says 'that looks like it does exactly what I need', it gets ported over.

Modifié par JohnEpler, 16 mars 2011 - 02:24 .

[John Epler]

CLime wrote...

Hell, I was ready to give Bioware credit for a sly shout-out to Mass Effect when I first noticed this, but don't let me stop you from taking all the fun out of it.

Well, the scene itself was supposed to be a shout out. Just not the animation, necessarily. Though I don't think it's used elsewhere, so I'll stop ruining it for you

[John Epler]

DinoCrisisFan wrote...

JohnEpler wrote...

CLime wrote...

Hell, I was ready to give Bioware credit for a sly shout-out to Mass Effect when I first noticed this, but don't let me stop you from taking all the fun out of it.

Well, the scene itself was supposed to be a shout out. Just not the animation, necessarily. Though I don't think it's used elsewhere, so I'll stop ruining it for you

Do you work for BioWare? Or are you a volunteer moderator?

I'm a Cinematic Designer. Which means I'm one of the guys who takes the written dialogue, then adds cameras, animations, faceFX and VFX to make it more visually interesting.

So when it comes to animations and how they're used, I speak from experience!

[John Epler]

Suron wrote...

wow, hard job when a lot of it is just ported from work already done :innocent:

face is we were criticized by BioWare to "wait and see" amongst all the "don't turn Dragon Age into Dragon Effect" threads and worry.  Then we get DA2 and..guess what....dialogue wheel (at least it has SOME differences, if very few) but then blatant copy/pasted animations out of ME2.  Again, musta been a cake job.

Actually, the animations being reused or not has absolutely zero impact on how much work Cinematic Design has to do. The job has everything to do with when and where animations are used, as well as what's being done with cameras, with VFX, the whole lot.

What resources are available only determines what sorts of things we can use in our scenes. It doesn't make it easier or faster to put scenes together - it merely dictates what those scenes can look like. If anything, a larger library of animations would make my job a little faster because I wouldn't have to try and combine three seemingly separate animations to get a particular effect - I could just use the 'guy puts hands on friend's shoulder' animation, rather than clipping a half dozen frames from the '2arm_arms_open' animation and looping them.